Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns.

I'm Andy Serwer and welcome to our guest, Cliff Aznes, who's the managing and founding principle of the hedge fund AQR.

Cliff, great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Andy. It's great to be here.

So tell us about AQR. It's a quant hedge fund, very big, $123 billion or so under management.

What do you guys deal?

We grew out of really academia.

Three of the four founding partners met in the PhD program at the University of Chicago in, I shuddered to say, the 1980s.

A lot of the original research there and what we now call

factor investing. We didn't have that term back then. It's funny. You always look at history

and you use today's terms for it. Things like low multiple stocks, beating high multiple

stocks, good momentum, beating bad momentum. That's what I wrote my dissertation on.

It's grown tremendously from that, both a number of factors and other things we do,

things like machine learning. The world has changed, but it's all an outgrowth of that original

academic research. And we use it to run portfolios, both hedge funds, as you say, where we take pride in actually hedging,

meaning we're long and short, a pretty similar amount, trying to be really uncorrelated.

But we also do run long only beat the benchmark accounts, essentially using the same models just to know what to over and underweight.

And we're 27 years in and some ups and downs, but life's been good.

Yeah, I want to talk about that 27 years because longevity in the business is not necessarily

a given, Cliff.

And how do you explain that then that you guys have done so well for so long? You have

had ups and downs, though. Yeah, yeah, of course. This sounds too rara for us, but we're true

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