Management team

Andrew W. Lo, Chairman and Chief Investment Strategist

Andrew sets the research agenda for the firm and collaborates with the research scientists on the design and enhancement of the firm's proprietary investment models. Andrew chairs the AlphaSimplex Investment Committee and in this capacity plays a leadership role in vetting, approving, and documenting all AlphaSimplex investment models and products as well as in monitoring and assessing their performance.

Andrew has 24 years of industry experience. Prior to starting AlphaSimplex, Andrew developed investment strategies and trading technologies as a consultant to a number of prominent Wall Street firms.

In addition to his responsibilities at AlphaSimplex, Andrew is the Harris & Harris Group Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he pursues a separate but complementary research agenda focused on the fundamental aspects of investments and financial markets. Examples of the complementary nature of this research include his studies on measuring illiquidity risk in hedge-fund returns, alternative betas and hedge-fund replication strategies, the growth of systemic risk in the hedge-fund industry, and his Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. This research agenda provides the academic foundations for the applied R&D and product engineering activities at AlphaSimplex.

His awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship, the Paul A. Samuelson Award, the American Association for Individual Investors Award, the Graham and Dodd Award, the 2001 IAFE-SunGard Financial engineer of the Year Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the CFA Institute.s James R. Vertin Award. He is a former governor of the Boston Stock Exchange, and currently a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the FINRA's Economic Advisory Board.

Andrew has published numerous journal articles and several books, including Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective (2008), A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street (1999), and The Econometrics of Financial Markets (1997).

Andrew received a B.A. in Economics from Yale University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1984.

Jeremiah H. Chafkin, President and CEO

Jerry joined the firm in 2007 and brings twenty-four years of industry experience, Jerry is responsible for all aspects of the day-to-day operations of AlphaSimplex. The head of each business function—Research and Trading, Risk and Compliance, Technology, Finance &Administration, and Client Service and Marketing—reports to him. He is also a member of the AlphaSimplex Investment and Risk Committees.

Prior to AlphaSimplex, Jerry was responsible for all Natixis’ affiliated asset managers in the United States and Asia. He came to Natixis from the Charles Schwab Corporation where he was a member of its Executive Committee and was President of its Advised Investor Division with responsibility for equity research, mutual fund ratings, and all direct advice services the company provided its retail clients. Previously at Schwab, Jerry headed Schwab’s asset management and mutual fund divisions. Before Schwab, Jerry was the CEO of Structured Investment Management for Bankers Trust Company which was one of the largest asset managers in the United States. During his fifteen-year tenure there, he held several other senior management positions including COO of U.S. Asset Management, Chairman and President of Japan Bankers Trust Company, and Co-Head of Fixed Income.

Jerry earned a BA in Economics from Yale University and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University.

Xiru Zhang, Chief Investment Officer

Xiru is responsible for the day-to-day supervision of AlphaSimplex's research scientists and reports directly to Dr. Lo. He is responsible for the daily monitoring of AlphaSimplex's investment strategies and the identification of opportunities to enhance them. He is a member of the AlphaSimplex Investment Committee.

Prior to joining AlphaSimplex in February 2009, Xiru was a founding member and Chief Investment Officer of PHZ Partners for 14 years. PHZ managed quantitative hedge-fund strategies including managed futures and statistical arbitrage. Prior to starting PHZ, Xiru was a research scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation where he worked on statistical algorithms for massively parallel computing platforms.

Xiru received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brandeis University where his research focus was on prediction algorithms for protein secondary structures. Xiru received a Master's Degree in Computer Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin, China.

Arnout M. Eikeboom, Chief Compliance and Risk Officer

In addition to his role as Chief Compliance Officer, Arnout chairs the AlphaSimplex Risk Committee which is charged with the responsibility of reviewing and managing the risk exposures of all investment products and services. He has been with AlphaSimplex since 2000 and has fifteen years of industry experience.

Prior to joining AlphaSimplex, Arnout held several positions at Goldman Sachs between 1994 and 2000, including manager of the Derivative Price Verification Group within the Firmwide Risk Department. In addition to dealing with valuation questions internal to Goldman Sachs, he interacted extensively with auditors and regulators on questions regarding derivatives pricing and regulatory capital computations dependent on pricing and Value-At-Risk models.

Arnout received the equivalents of a BA in Econometrics and an MA in Operations Research from the Free University in Amsterdam followed by a PhD in Management (specializing in Finance) from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Kendall A. Walker, Chief Financial Officer

Kendall is responsible for both business and portfolio accounting. He joined AlphaSimplex in 2005 with nine years of industry experience.

Prior to joining AlphaSimplex, Kendall was Senior Vice President and Controller for Santa Barbara Alpha Strategies (SBAS), a registered investment adviser to the Santa Barbara fund of funds family, which ran a leveraged portfolio of approximately sixty underlying managers using structured financing and derivatives. Preceding SBAS, Kendall served as an audit manager in the hedge fund group of Ernst & Young in Dallas, Texas where he coordinated the audit and tax relationships for a diverse portfolio of hedge funds clients. Before that, he was an audit manager in the Cayman Islands office of Ernst & Young and worked on an international portfolio of hedge funds, large global private banks and special purpose vehicles.

Kendall received a Bachelor of Commerce degree (majoring in Finance) from the University of Calgary. He is a licensed Certified Public Accountant and a Chartered Financial Analyst.