Clifford Asness

His undergraduate studies at University of Pennsylvania included a double major in which he studied computer science and finance at Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology (M&T). In 1988, he graduated summa cum laude. Asness's interest in finance and portfolio management began, while he worked a research assistant in the Finance Department at Wharton, and learned to use "coding computer programs" to analyze markets" and "test economic and financial theories".

Asness started his career in 1990, when he was 24 and still a PhD student. In the early 1990s, he had left academia, to the regret of his mentor, to become manager of Goldman Sachs Asset Management's (GSAM) "new quantitative research desk". He invited two friends from his cohort at the University of Chicago to join him at GSAM. Together, they began "developing models to evaluate risk in currencies, bonds and entire economies." While the "idea of factors" came from Fama and French, it was first "put into practice" in the late 1990s by Asness, according to The Economist.

In 1994, Asness completed his PhD in finance at the University of Chicago. Asness was the Teaching Assistant (TA) for his dissertation adviser, Nobel laureate Eugene Fama Fama—who was also Asness' mentor —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. Fama and French had contrasted value stocks with growth stocks. Since Fama and French's inception of value stocks, "quants have designed algorithms that can scour market data" looking for "factors".

In 1995, Asness persuaded a few partners at Goldman to provide him with an initial US$10-million investment to employ the computer-driven models that his team had developed, to invest in the market.

In 1998 in New York, when he was 31-years old, Asness, David Kabiller, John Liew, and Robert Krail, co-founded AQR Capital Management—a "quantitative hedge fund firm".

Asness was featured in Scott Patterson's 2010 publication, The Quants, 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. a "scourge of bad practices in the money management industry" with the "intellectual chops to back up his attacks". Patterson said that Asness was known as "one of the smartest investors in the world." 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."

In 1999, Asness married Laurel Elizabeth Fraser of Seward, Nebraska, the daughter of a retired Methodist pastor. Asness has four children.

In 2002, Asness made $37 million, and in 2003, he made $50 million. In 2004, AQR moved its headquarters from New York to Greenwich, Connecticut.

In a co-authored 2001 article published in the Journal of Portfolio Management, the authors described how, while some hedge fund managers are skilled in picking stocks, not all use effective methods. In their 2003 publication in the Financial Analysts Journal, Arnott and Asness wrote that contrary to prevailing theory, companies that paid higher dividends, actually had higher growth in earnings. They found that low payout ratios "preceded low earnings growth." 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.

The New York Times published a "lengthy and glowing profile" of Asness on June 5, 2005. The Times said that "what Asness really does is try to understand the relationship between risk and reward."

In 2008, he complained about short-selling restrictions in The New York Times. 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 Bloomberg columns, he discussed taxation of investment managers and healthcare reform. He posts commentary on financial issues, generally from a libertarian and efficient markets viewpoint.

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."

In 2012, he was included in the 50 Most Influential list of Bloomberg Markets Magazine.

In a 2013 co-authored article published in The Journal of Finance, Asness, Tobias Moskowitz, and Lasse Pedersen found "consistent value and momentum return premia across eight diverse markets and asset classes, and a strong common factor structure among their returns." Since this strategy for accumulation is subject to the same constraints as any other and systemic effects in markets can invalidate it: AQR and other similar ventures lost massive amounts of wealth in the Financial crisis of 2007-2010 with assets declining from $39 billion in 2007 to $17 billion by the end of 2008.

In 2013, Asness was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case.

In 2016, Connecticut's State Bond Commission gave $35 million in financial aid to AQR, as part of a "broader move by the Connecticut government to persuade companies", including Bridgewater Associates, the biggest hedge fund in the world, to remain in Connecticut. AQR's $28 million loan, would be "forgiven" if AQR kept "540 jobs within Connecticut" and created 600 new jobs by 2026. AQR received grants worth $7 million to "help pay for an expansion."

By 2017, according to Forbes, Asness had "moved away from hedge funds" and aggressively promoted lower-fees, more "liquid and transparent products", such as "mutual funds, that use computer models, often to replicate hedge fund returns".

By 2019, AQR had become an "investment firm"—running "one of the world's largest hedge funds". A 2020 Forbes profile described AQR (Applied Quantitative Research) as an agency that employs "factor-based investing," and offers products ranging from hedge funds to mutual funds.

He listed his Miami penthouse for sale in October 2019, after purchasing it from Boris Jordan in May 2018.