Value Investing Proponent Cliff Asness’s Net Worth Reflects His Expertise

Cliff Asness, co-founder and chief investment officer of AQR Capital Management, has provided his insights on the current and future interest rate scenario and how value stocks could keep outperforming growth stocks even if interest rates don’t go up. According to AQR’s data, the correlation between value stock returns and interest rates over 40 years stands at a mere 0.03. What's Cliff Asness’s net worth?

Cliff Asness co-founded AQR Capital in 1998. The company focuses on factor-based investing and offers products ranging from hedge funds to mutual funds. He has received several awards and authored articles on a number of financial topics

Asness received five Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Awards from The Journal of Portfolio Management in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2014, and 2015. He has also won the Graham and Dodd Awards for the year’s best paper and ranked second for the Fama/DFA Prize for Capital Markets and Asset Pricing in the 2020 Journal of Financial Economics.

Born in Queens, Asness grew up on New York’s Long Island. After graduating with degrees in economics and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, he landed on Wall Street in the mid-1990s. He became manager at Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s new quantitative research desk, and then called on his classmates at the University of Chicago, Liew and Robert Krail, to join him. Together, they created Goldman’s most successful hedge fund, the Global Alpha quantitative strategy.

In 1998, Asness, Liew, and Krail left Goldman to set up their own quantitative hedge fund, AQR. Although this was soon followed by the internet stock bubble and the fund performed poorly, it survived the downturn and delivered strong returns for few years after. The fund suffered losses in 2007 and 2008 due to the financial crisis but again recovered.

According to Forbes, Asness's real-time net worth is $1.4 billion. He co-founded AQR Capital Management, which oversees $124 billion in assets. Asness made $37 million in 2002 and $50 million in 2003. He and AQR have made money by using complicated computerized trading models to first locate underpriced equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities, and then using short-selling to take advantage of upward or downward price momentum.

Asness and AQR believe in systematic value investing. According to AFR, in 2022, “AQR’s global value strategy was up 52 per cent for the year to May, net of fees, while the long-running absolute return multi-strategy fund was up 35.4 per cent.”