Professor Philippe Jorion joins PAAMCO

PAAMCO is a USD 7.4 billion fund-of-hedge-funds company and Professor Jorion will be based in the firm’s Irvine office in California, where he will focus on further enhancing both the firm’s risk management processes and infrastructure. His primary area of responsibility will be on the analysis and valuation of complex security types and new markets.
 
‘Hiring Philippe is a clear statement of our firm’s continuing commitment to risk management,’ says Jane Buchan, Chief Executive Officer of PAAMCO. ‘Having known Philippe personally and academically since the late 1980s, I know he will be a great addition to our firm. His knowledge and skill both strengthen and complement our firm’s traditional quantitative roots.’

Professor Jorion has authored more than eighty publications directed to academics and practitioners on the topics of risk management and international finance. His work has received wide recognition, including the Smith Breeden Prize in 1999, which is awarded to the best papers in the Journal of Finance. He has also carried out extensive work in the area of financial risk management with derivative instruments, and is known as an expert on the topic of Value at Risk. Examples of his most notable work include the Financial Risk Manager Handbook, (Wiley 3rd ed. 2005), which provides the core body of quantitative methods and tools for financial risk managers; Big Bets Gone Bad: Derivatives and Bankruptcy in Orange County, (Academic Press 1995), the first account of the largest municipal failure in US history; and Value at Risk: The New Benchmark for Managing Financial Risk (McGraw 1996), the first definitive book on VAR.

PAAMCO is renowned for its leadership positions on issues of particular concern to sophisticated institutional hedge fund investors, including position-level transparency from underlying hedge funds.

‘Hiring Philippe not only embodies our firm’s goal in maintaining an ever-improving, offensive-minded risk management approach, but also, we believe, keeps PAAMCO on the cutting-edge of the development and refinement of risk management processes in general,’ adds Buchan.
 
Professor Jorian says: ‘Risk management has never been as important to investors as it is today given the increasing complexity of the world’s financial markets. I am delighted to join PAAMCO, which is widely recognized for its superior risk management capabilities.’

Jorion is the Chancellor’s Professor of Finance at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California at Irvine. He is a frequent speaker at academic and professional conferences and regularly delivers executive seminars on the topics of risk management, global asset allocation, fixed income markets, and international finance. He serves on the editorial board of a number of finance journals and was formerly editor-in-chief of the Journal of Risk. Professor Jorion holds an MBA and a PhD from the University of Chicago, and a degree in engineering from the University of Brussels.

Background notes: Pacific Alternative Asset Management Company (PAAMCO) is a hedge-fund-of-funds dedicated to offering strategic investment solutions to large, sophisticated institutional investors. Based in Irvine, California, PAAMCO was started in March 2000, and currently has approximately USD 7.4 billion under management as of June 2006. The firm’s portfolio management team has both a strong academic background and years of experience in working with institutions and analyzing hedge funds with a focus on convertible bond hedging, sovereign debt & mortgage hedging, equity market neutral, merger arbitrage, credit hedging, distressed debt, long/short equity and short biased.

PAAMCO has a global staff of 64, including fourteen senior investment professionals and is owned by nine of its employees. In 2003, PAAMCO established a subsidiary in London (PAAMCO Europe), which is majority-owned by PAAMCO in the US.