(Bloomberg) Nowadays, it’s a rare selloff that isn’t blamed on the growing heft of a strategy called risk parity.
But to a 52-year-old quant who helped develop it, the problem isn’t that risk parity is too big, but too small.
From his office on Boston Harbor, Edward Qian of PanAgora Asset Management has made it his life’s work trying to prove that the strategy — more popularly associated with Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates — isn’t just a tool for divvying up stocks and bonds in hedge funds. Nor is it the destructive force that critics say could ruin markets. Pointing to three small photos of star clusters propped up at the edge of his desk, Qian says its principles are to investing what gravity is to the universe.
