Michael Kharitonov and Jon McAuliffe, the Killer Quants
As some of the big names in the field have struggled, the duo has quietly raked in almost $3 billion this year.
(From left) Jon McAuliffe and Michael Kharitonov, co-founders of Voleon Group.
Source: VoleonKharitonov and McAuliffe started in quantitative investing more than 20 years ago at pioneering company D.E. Shaw & Co. Kharitonov had trained as a computer scientist at Stanford, and McAuliffe got his doctorate in statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Voleon, which they founded in 2007, has about 150 employees. Its recent success—almost doubling assets under management since the start of 2019, to a little more than $6 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter—is owed to its early embrace of machine learning. The hedge fund is among the largest to exclusively use this form of artificial intelligence to trade. It’s reaping rewards as fewer companies are relying solely on AI for live trading because it requires so much expertise, money, and time to build an algorithm capable of weathering markets roiled by unpredictable events.
