Robert D. Arnott (born June 29, 1954[1]) is an American businessman, investor, and writer who focuses on articles about quantitative investing.
He is the founder and chairman of the board of Research Affiliates, an asset management firm. Research Affiliates develops investment strategies for other firms, and there are over US$166 billion assets under the management of firms using their strategies as of September 2021.[2] He edited CFA Institute's Financial Analysts Journal from 2002 to 2006, and has edited three books on equity management and tactical asset allocation.[3][better source needed] Arnott is a co-author of the book The Fundamental Index: A Better Way to Invest, and co-editor of three other books relating to asset allocation and equity market investing.[4]
Arnott has received seven[6] Graham and Dodd Scrolls and Awards, awarded annually by the CFA Institute for best articles of the year, and has received four Bernstein-Fabozzi/Jacobs-Levy awards from the Journal of Portfolio Management and Institutional Investor magazine.[7]
Arnott has published over 130 academic papers in refereed journals.[5] Topics of these papers have included the following: mutual fund returns, the equity risk premium, tactical asset allocation, and alternative index investing.
Career
In college, Arnott contemplated a career in either astrophysics or finance. He opted for finance after deciding his math skills were inadequate for making serious contributions to science, but above average for finance or investing, as he later recalled, "where hardly anyone was using serious math at the time.”[11]
After college, he worked at Salomon Brothers and in 1998 became chairman of First Quadrant, LP.
In 2002, Arnott founded Research Affiliates, a Newport Beach, California-based investment management firm. As of June 30, 2021, about $171 billion in assets are managed worldwide using investment strategies developed by Research Affiliates.[12] The firm has been involved with fundamentally based indexes since mid-2004 and has worked with the FTSE Group to create indices based on this methodology.[13] Research Affiliates licenses its indexes to Schwab, Invesco and PIMCO.[14]
In November, 2009, Research Affiliates was granted a patent for their index methodology that selects and weights securities using fundamental measures of company size.[15]
Arnott co-manages the PIMCO All Asset Fund, a tactical fund of funds with $16 billion in assets as of March 2022, which can invest in any of PIMCO's many mutual funds.[16] This fund is intended to feature what Arnott calls "Third Pillar" options, meant to diversify beyond mainstream stocks and investment-grade bonds, and may include master limited partnerships, high-yield bonds, emerging markets debt, or liquid alternatives with the goal of boosting long-term portfolio performance.[17]
