Clifford S. Asness: More Info

Clifford S. Asness won’t discuss the specifics of his paycheck, but if you ask him what it’s like to have that much money, he won’t duck the question the way most hedge-fund managers do. Instead, he’ll lean back on his couch, scratch his neatly trimmed beard and offer a sheepish smile. ”To quote Dudley Moore in the movie ‘Arthur,’ ” he’ll finally tell you, ”it doesn’t suck.” Cliff Asness talks that way. It is one of the qualities that separate him from his brethren in the hedge-fund community who tend to keep a very low public profile.

Cliff Asness is an outspoken, exuberant Ph.D. in financial economics who has built a reputation for his willingness to write and say what he’s thinking.

In academia, he’s known for the witty, biting papers he writes for publications like The Financial Analysts Journal. Among financial journalists, he is known as a cogent and articulate bear — someone who can make a compelling case that stock-market returns over the next decades will almost certainly be less than the returns that investors have become used to in the past.

Among the hedge-fund crowd, Asness is known as someone who has been thinking hard thoughts about the future of hedge funds.

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