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READ MORE What the heck is a hedge fund? Click here to find out. |
Some people are connoisseurs of wine, others of music. Jaffray Woodriff is a connoisseur of algorithms.
Woodriff entered the market-prediction game in 1991 as a recent McIntire School of Commerce grad armed with only a series of algorithms and a hunch, bouncing around more normal finance jobs until 2002. Then Woodriff and partners Michael Geismar and Greyson Williams started Quantitative Investment Management with some of their own money. Their first account opened in 2003, with $250,000. By 2005, they managed about $10 million. Now, after eight years, the 29-employee business on Market Street manages $5 billion and is the biggest hedge fund in the Southeast. (A hedge fund takes money from a small number of investors and invests broadly and over long periods of time.) And they’ve never lost an employee, Woodriff says.
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When he looks back on the recession, Woodriff says, “I’m going to say, ‘I’m really proud of the fact that we made double-digit returns to our investors with fairly low volatility…in two ridiculously strange years.” |
A childhood lover of video games and Dungeons and Dragons, Woodriff, who looks young to be in his early 40s, is playing the markets and winning. “It’s always been a secondary goal to make lots of money,” he says. “But that’s the scoreboard when you’re managing money.”
The company’s almost magical ability to turn some into more—they’ve made their investors almost $2 billion since the company was founded—stems from Woodriff’s computers work. He says it identifies “emergent behaviors of large groups of people debating, fighting over a price in a particular market.” But he’s hoping that the algorithms’ ability to predict markets will eventually be recognized for other practical applications to fields like medicine, even geology.
Woodriff’s work ethic has been described as monk-like. His office is strewn with books about everything from market behavior to devices that can read eye movements. And on one wall a bank of computer monitors with grim black screens blinks, as if beckoning for more code. Therein lies the magic: “Let the computers do the work is always one of my mantras,” he says.
