[5][6] In 1989, Asness enrolled at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he received his MBA with high honors in 1991, and his PhD in finance in 1994.
[7][8] At Chicago, Asness was the teaching assistant (TA) for his dissertation adviser, Nobel laureate Eugene Fama[8][5] — who was also Asness' mentor[9] — and the economist, Kenneth French, who were both influential and widely respected empirical financial economists, had established the foundations of their Fama–French three-factor model in 1992.
Since Fama and French's inception of value stocks, "quants have designed algorithms that can scour market data" looking for "factors".
While he did not originate these concepts, Asness was credited with being the first to compile enough empirical evidence across a wide variety of markets to bring the ideas into the academic financial mainstream.
[11] Asness and his team at GSAM built on Fama and French's idea of factors,[10] and combined their work with insights he had gained from his own PhD research.
[14] Asness and his team used complicated computerized trading models to first locate underpriced equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities and then use short selling to take advantage of upward or downward price momentum.
[16] By 2007, at its height, Global Alpha was "one of the biggest and best performing hedge funds in the world" with more than $12 billion assets under management (AUM).
[21][12] An October 2010 Bloomberg article described AQR as a "quantitative investment firm" that used "algorithms and computerized models to trade stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.
[22][23] The fund is co-run by founding partners AQR alumnus Brian Hurst and former Goldman Sachs chief information officer Elisha Wiesel.
"[Academic_publications 2] In a 2003 Journal of Portfolio Management article, Asness said that it was a mistake to compare stock market's P/E ratio—earnings yield—to interest rates (called the Fed model).
"[19] Asness was featured in Scott Patterson's 2010 publication, The Quants,[25] along with Aaron Brown from AQR Capital Management, Ken Griffin from Chicago's Citadel LLC, James Simons from Renaissance Technologies, and Boaz Weinstein from Deutsche Bank.
He had been a "standout student at the University of Chicago's prestigious economics department in the early 1990s, then a star at Goldman Sachs in the mid-1990s before branching out on his own in 1998 to launch AQR with $1 billion and change, a near record at the time.
[29] In a 2010 The Wall Street Journal op-ed (written with Aaron Brown) he claimed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill would lead to regulatory capture, crony capitalism and a massive "financial-regulatory complex.
In 2013, Asness was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case.
[41][42] In 2023, Asness declared he would no longer donate to his alma mater University of Pennsylvania due to their hosting the Palestine Writes festival, and what he called a “drift away from true freedom of thought, expression and speech.”[43] In 1999, Asness married Laurel Elizabeth Fraser of Seward, Nebraska, the daughter of a retired Methodist pastor.