Andrew Ang, PhD

Andrew Ang, PhD

Managing Director, Head of Factors, Sustainable and Solutions for BlackRock Systematic

Andrew Ang, PhD, Managing Director, is Head of Factors, Sustainable and Solutions for BlackRock Systematic. He also serves as Senior Advisor to BlackRock Retirement Solutions. As part of BlackRock Systematic, the Factors, Sustainable and Solutions group is responsible for proprietary factor investing, delivering cutting-edge sustainable alpha, ESG outcomes and product innovation.

 

Dr. Ang is a well-known financial economist specializing in quantitative investing. Author of over 100 publications, Dr. Ang has published on equities, fixed income, optimal asset allocation, and alternative assets. He has written seminal papers in the area of factor investing, including research behind the minimum volatility factor, incorporating macro factors into bond pricing models and factor allocation. His book, "Asset Management: A Systematic Approach to Factor Investing" is a comprehensive guide showing how factor risk premiums can be harvested in portfolio design and incorporated in all aspects of investment management.

 

Dr. Ang has won many industry prizes and grants, including the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy award, and awards and grants from Q Group, INQUIRE, Netspar, and the National Science Foundation. According to RePEc/IDEAS, the largest bibliographic database in the field of economics, Dr. Ang is rated in the top 0.1% of world-wide economists by citations, downloads, and views.

 

Before joining BlackRock, Dr. Ang was the Ann F. Kaplan Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. He was previously Chair of the Finance and Economics Division and a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. As a professor, Dr. Ang worked with several large institutional managers as an advisor. His work with industry was recognized by aiCIO naming him one of the top 10 most influential academics in the institutional investing world.

 

Dr. Ang earned a BEc (Hons) from Macquarie University, and a PhD in finance and MS in statistics from Stanford University. Dr. Ang used to be a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia

People at BlackRock Andrew Ang

Jan 27, 2017

This video does not constitute a recommendation by BlackRock, or an offer to sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any securities, product or service.

  • People of BlackRock with Andrew Ang

    Hi, I’m Andrew Ang and I lead Factor Based Investing at BlackRock.

    I view myself as a conductor. I deliver investment outcomes in terms of factors – broad, persistent drivers of returns.

    I think factors are going to be transformative but in order for them to be very wide-spread, we need data and technology. We also need education and outreach which we saw during the 1990’s for example with the rise of index funds. We need efficient investment vehicles.

    The way that I see data and technology is very similar to my phone, my smartphone. And I love my smartphone. But if we look at the apps there, we’ve seen all of those things many years ago – like maps, or car services, hotels or airlines. And what we’ve done with factor investing is like the phone. We take very intuitive investment concepts, like buying cheap (value investing) or riding the trend (momentum investing), but we’ve made the phone. So we can deliver those types of intuitive investment styles across the world. We can trade them with ruthless efficiency and we can help them to achieve investment outcomes.

    Risk management has always been part of the DNA of this firm and factors have been central to that. But what’s happened with factors is they’ve gone beyond just being used in a risk management context to mitigate unintended risk to being able to take deliberate potentially time varying views on rewarded factors as an investment strategy in its own right.

    We’ve been able to democratize access to these factors and all investors, both large and small want outcomes. Reducing risk or enhancing returns. Increased diversification. And factors help to meet those goals.

    The opinions expressed are current as of January 1, 2017 and are subject to change. Reliance upon information in this video is at the sole discretion of the viewer.

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