The Role of Complexity in Financial Markets

On this episode of Seeking Risk: The FabRick Show, Rick is joined by Ashvin Chhabra. Apart from a two-part series, this discussion focuses on the intersection between finance and science in relation to theoretical physics, systems, and complexity. Ashvin Chhabra is President of Euclidean Capital, which is responsible for the management of investments for James H. Simons & Marilyn Simons and their associated foundations. The Simons Foundation is dedicated to advancing research in basic science and mathematics. Dr. Chhabra was Chief Investment Officer and head of investment management and guidance at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management from 2013-2015. He was the Chief Investment Officer at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2007-2013 and Managing Director and head of wealth management strategies and analytics for Merrill Lynch’s Global Private Client Group from 2001-2007. Ashvin is also the author of The Aspirational Investor, published by Harper Collins in 2015. He is widely recognized as one of the founders of goals based wealth management and for his seminal work “Beyond Markowitz '' which integrates Modern Portfolio Theory with Behavioral Finance and proposes a novel Wealth Allocation framework. Dr. Chhabra is the immediate past chair of the Board of Regents for the Financial Analysts Seminar of CFA Institute. He is also a member of the international advisory board of EDHEC-Risk Institute, the Board of Trustees of the Stony Brook Foundation, and the investment committee of the Institute for Advanced Study. He holds a PhD in applied physics from Yale University in the field of nonlinear dynamics (Chaos theory).