Beachhead Capital Management, an investment advisory firm that specialises in liquid alternative investments, has appointed Dr Pankaj Ghemawat to oversee the firm’s Research Advisory Board, which focuses on structural changes within the asset management industry.
Ghemawat (pictured), currently serves as a full professor at both the NYU Stern School of Business and IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. Prior to this, he was a professor at Harvard Business School, and was the youngest person appointed to a full professorship. Ghemawat is the author of eight books and over one hundred articles, and has received numerous industry awards. He has an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University.
“Dr. Ghemawat and I have spent the past decade discussing how the asset management industry is changing – for instance, the impact of widespread fee reduction due to a market leader (Vanguard) that prices products at cost, the efforts of higher cost players to slow the compression of margins, the misallocation of capital to strategies like hedge funds where too much of the value created is lost in fees,” says Andrew Beer, Managing Member of Beachhead. “Dr. Ghemawat will bring a rigorous, unique and powerful analytic framework that will enable Beachhead to capitalize on key industry trends, such as passive vs. active management, the rise of asset allocation models, and greater transparency around costs and fees.”
He joins Matt Grayson, a former academic mathematician who built quantitative trading strategies at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to improve the accuracy of Beachhead’s proprietary replication-based models; and Heiko Ebens, who designed one of the first and most successful replication-based indices while overseeing quantitative equity research at Merrill Lynch.
Ghemawat says: “Hedge funds constitute a truly remarkable industry in terms of the extent to which they manage to extract for themselves the surplus they create instead of passing it on to investors. This makes them ripe for disruption with low cost/high liquidity strategies of the sort developed by Beachhead.”
The research developed jointly with Ghemawat will be made available to the public through forthcoming articles in leading industry periodicals.
