Can a Hedge Fund Quant Remake a City Without Destroying It?
A University of Virginia grad thinks he can turn Charlottesville into a tech hub while preserving its small-town feel.
It would be a walkable tech hub.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/BloombergI went to Charlottesville, Virginia, a few months ago to talk to a man who had just given his alma mater its largest-ever private gift: $120 million.
The man is Jaffray Woodriff, the school is the University of Virginia, and the gift’s purpose is to establish a school that, he hopes, will advance the frontiers of artificial intelligence, machine learning and other aspects of data science. Woodriff got rich running a quant hedge fund; his Quantitative Investment Management, with $2.8 billion1 under management, uses black box algorithms to find trading patterns it can take advantage of. Since its founding in 2003, QIM’s cumulative return is 240 percent (though like many quant funds, it was clobbered in 2018, with one of its funds down 42 percent).