Gregg Fisher, a portfolio manager and factor investing specialist, has launched Quent Capital, a New York City-based investment firm which will focus on a global small cap long/short strategy.Over the course of his 30-year career in investment management, Fisher has developed and fine-tuned innovative investment strategies over multiple market cycles and constructed institutional-grade investment operations. Known as a research-driven, quant-focused investor, Fisher has a history of launching strategies when their respective asset classes were out of favour; each time, he produced a track record that matched or exceeded the relevant benchmarks over investment periods of more than a decade.
“Quantitative investing and entrepreneurship are my passions in life and form the basis of this new venture and the word ‘Quent,’” says Fisher. “With small, entrepreneurial companies now able to source top talent from around the world and acquire institutional-grade technology at low cost, dynamic firms with disruptive technologies and services will be able to meet the challenges of the turbulence and dislocations in today’s economy and forge ahead. I am excited to focus my attention on helping qualified investors systematically and thoughtfully gain exposure to the surge in innovation that I am anticipating we will see across the world.”
In 1993, Fisher founded Gerstein Fisher, a quantitative investment firm that was one of the first investment managers to offer factor investing. In the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, the firm launched three factor-based strategies, helping to pioneer factor investing in the global growth stock and global REIT asset classes. Fisher was the highly ranked, sole portfolio manager for these strategies, which matched or exceeded their respective benchmarks. In 2016, with more than USD4 billion in assets under management and advisement, Fisher sold Gerstein Fisher to People’s United Bank. Today, in the face of recent growth of large cap and private equity investment, Fisher is choosing to focus on global small cap public equities.
“It is my belief that public equity is a more cost-effective and nimble way to participate in today’s global creative disruption than private equity, which tends to overpay for assets,” says Fisher. “Quent will combine academic research and quantitative analysis to systematically measure characteristics such as R&D, brand and human capital that allow small companies to succeed but generally have been ignored by traditional accounting measures and the public markets.”
The strategy was originally run out of the Fisher family office, and a significant portion of Fisher’s liquid assets are invested in the fund, keeping his interests aligned with those of investors.
