Quantitative Researcher

Meet the hedge fund billionaire who kickstarted Wall Street's newest tax dodge. illustration by philip smith for forbes ByJohn Hyatt, Forbes Staff. John Hyatt is a NYC-based Forbes staff writer covering Wall Street. Aug 31, 2026, 06:30am EDT After helping AQR pioneer a novel tax avoidance investment strategy, accounting PhD Hoon Kim left to start Quantinno. Thanks to thousands of wealth managers and their ultra-rich clients, assets have swelled from $2 billion to $70 billion in three years. The long-running stock bull market has left America's wealthiest with a tax problem: too many investment gains with too few losses. With major indexes marching ever higher, and as founders and early employees of tech firms accumulate fortunes in concentrated stock positions, it's become harder and harder for wealthy folks to identify losers that they can use to "harvest" losses to offset their capital gains. A fast-growing strategy designed to fix this problem has become the toast of the investment industry, from the Wall Street hedge funds crafting the products to the independent advisors hawking them to clients. In the so-called long-short tax-aware strategy, an investor uses leverage to make hundreds, even thousands, of additional bets on stocks - some that they own, and some that they short. (Shorting is betting that a stock will fall: you borrow shares, sell them and later buy them back, preferably at a lower price). The novel formula deliberately creates plenty of losses, on either its long or short positions, which investors can harvest to strategically offset gains elsewhere, while keeping most of their money invested in the rising stock market. Today, the assets committed to long-short tax aware strategies are fast approaching $200 billion, up from just a few billion five years ago. With an estimated $260 billion under management Greenwich-based AQR Capital Management, a 1,000-person hedge fund and asset manager, is well known as a pioneer of this trading strategy. Its success has prompted blue chip copycats from asset management giants like BlackRock, Nuveen, and Franklin Templeton to fellow quant hedge funds like Two Sigma and WorldQuant. All have recently launched or are exploring similar "long-short tax aware" offerings. However, AQR's biggest rival is a little known New York City-based firm called Quantinno Capital Management. In fact Quantinno's founder, a 57-year-old accounting PhD named Hoon Kim, actually helped create one of AQR's first long-short funds during his 12-year run at AQR. As of March 2026 Quantinno's assets were reported to be $48.4 billion across 10,600 individual accounts, up from less than $300 million five years ago, according to its website and public filings. This net assets figure has since been removed from Quantinno's website, but in less than six months assets have further ballooned to around $70 billion, says one wealth advisor familiar with the firm's numbers. "I would call their success remarkable. I've actually never seen anything like it," says Brent Sullivan, a tax analyst and founder of the blog Tax Alpha Insider. Become a member and unlock unlimited access, expert analysis and exclusive member benefits. Already a member? Digital Membership Billed monthly LESS THAN $2/WEEK Digital Membership Billed annually Digital Membership Billed biennially Premium access to exclusive events, thought-provoking conversations with global leaders and more, all available on-demand. Elevated browsing experience with fewer ads and unlimited article saving power an enhanced reading experience. ByJohn Hyatt John Hyatt is a staff writer who covers finance, investments and billionaire dealmakers. Contact Hyatt with suggestions, tips and scoops at +1-720-951-2080 (Signal) or [email protected]. Read our community guidelines.

RavenPack and WorldQuant announce ai-powered data competition, accelerating financial innovation. PR Newswire "Data Creation Challenge" Powered by RavenPack's Bigdata.com Brings Institutional-Grade Data and Global Research Community Together Through the WorldQuant BRAIN Platform NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - RavenPack, the AI decision infrastructure provider for financial enterprises, and WorldQuant, a global quantitative asset management firm, today announced the launch of the "Data Creation Challenge." With participation taking place exclusively on WorldQuant BRAIN, a web-based simulation platform fueled by data and technology, across the platform's global research consultant community who have met rank thresholds and passed background checks, this six-week competition is designed to advance education in AI-driven financial research. This initiative combines data from Bigdata.com, RavenPack's AI-native platform delivering decision-grade financial intelligence, with WorldQuant BRAIN, which enables registered consultants to build and submit alphas[[1]] for potential compensation. "Financial innovation accelerates when high-quality data and modern infrastructure are accessible to researchers everywhere," said Armando Gonzalez, CEO and Founder of RavenPack. "This initiative is about education and AI enablement, showing how institutional-grade intelligence can be explored responsibly and creatively by a global research community." Transparent Participation, Protected Intelligence The competition is guided by a clear principle: transparent participation, protected intelligence. The campaign is designed as an educational showcase of how datasets are built, how unstructured financial information becomes research-ready, and how collaborative data science workflows operate in practice, while fully protecting individual models, signals, and proprietary methodologies. Participants will use RavenPack's open Search API via WorldQuant BRAIN to access data on Bigdata.com to build datasets from unstructured financial content. Throughout the competition, high-level insights will be shared. "The world is at a fascinating inflection point: with the proliferation of data and AI, we're reaching a place where you can quantify almost anything," said Nitish Maini, Chief Strategy Officer at WorldQuant. "By powering innovation in dataset creation, this competition is a natural extension of the initiatives we're always looking to pursue as we seek to amplify the BRAIN platform and empower our thousands of consultants worldwide." Expanding Access to Institutional-Grade Infrastructure Updates and details regarding the "Data Creation Challenge", such as the competition overview and timeline, educational materials, and weekly highlights of creative data engineering approaches and community-level learning themes will be hosted on Bigdata.com.