Outsmarting The Market

It came as no great surprise that Richard G. Sloan took a leave from his tenured position at the University of Michigan's business school last summer to join an investment firm. Wall Street has stepped up its hiring of academics in recent years, and the 42-year-old Sloan is one of accounting's bona fide stars. But Sloan's explanation of why he left academia for Barclays Global Investors (BGI) is startling. "I just felt that BGI was getting ahead of me," he says. "I came here because this is where the leading edge in my area of research is now."

As one of more than 100 PhDs in BGI's employ, Sloan reinforces a cadre of highly credentialed brainpower that no university finance or economics department in the land can match. San Francisco-based BGI is descended from a firm founded in the 1960s, but it has parlayed its prowess in the field of quantitative investing into an astounding recent growth spurt. bgi has added $877 billion in funds since 2002, boosting its assets under management to $1.62 trillion and enthroning it above State Street (SST ), Fidelity, and Vanguard as America's largest money manager.