AQR Capital Management has USD 180bn (!) AUM. Cliff Asness is a very active researcher and writer: Blog, Twitter, research papers, articles and guest contributions. He was twice awarded the Graham and Dodd Award for the year’s best paper, as well as a Graham and Dodd Excellence Award, the award for the best perspectives piece, and the Graham and Dodd Readers’ Choice Award – besides various other awards. His CV is included in the conference programme. Cliff has an estimated personal net worth of USD 2.6bn.
“Value is having a tough time because everyone hates it.”
Cliff Asness
(Quote picked up in the lobby after his presentation, but seemed like a good introduction of his entire talk.)
“Everything I am going to ‘recommend’ to you has not worked in the last two years!”
“The price earnings ratio is not the be-all and end-all, but it is kind of high these days. This measure and many other common measures are higher than the crash of 1929. When it is high, you make less long term. And vice versa.”
“Value has been a killer for ten years.”
“The last ten years in value investing were only half as painful as value investing during the tech bubble. It could get worse.”
“We are much more bullish on value going forward.”
Cliff Asness
When it comes to country allocation Cliff Asness’ views are “staggeringly similar to Barbara”.
“We don’t like the US either. Let me rephrase. We find the US to be quite expensive.”
Cliff’s talk was extremely insightful but it is very hard to summarise. The following are some (but not all) of the slides he presented.
What Cliff Asness explained directly reflects the writing on his blog, “Clif’s Perspectives”.
He is active politically and writes regular op-eds, and has been a fervent Tweeter with nearly 60k followers (though currently on a Twitter break).
My verdict: Do follow him! I certainly will. A fantastically energetic and articulate guy.
This report was written by Swen Lorenz. You want to know more about Swen’s work? Then we strongly recommend to take a look at his website www.undervalued-shares.com. There he offers more insights from the Punchcard conference and a very interesting members area.
