About
Founded in 1989, PanAgora Asset Management decided long ago to seek to build a unique, forward-looking investment firm underpinned by insightful research, innovation and creativity.
These same qualities that forged our value proposition 30 years ago remain more important than ever in seeking to deliver attractive risk-adjusted returns on behalf of our clients today.
At PanAgora, we strive for consistent performance and are committed to providing investors with reliable investment processes, transparency and access to the firm’s network of resources.
We pride ourselves on our time-tested investment approach and our team comprising leading academics and experienced investment professionals, all of whom are entrenched in the day-to-day oversight of our investors’ investments.
This senior, hands-on oversight, combined with our singular focus on seeking to develop and implement distinctive, active equity and multi-asset strategies, provides us with a capability to offer diversified and tailored investment solutions that are designed to help clients achieve their financial objectives and withstand tomorrow’s evolving investment landscape.
PanAgora offers institutional investors across the globe, including public and private retirement funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and foundations, and sub-advisory mandates, both absolute and relative return strategies within Alternative, Risk Premia and Active Equity disciplines.
Equity capabilities include absolute return, long-short and long-only strategies spanning the full universe of global developed and emerging markets, as well as sub-categories focused on specific regions, capitalizations and styles.
Our Multi-Asset capabilities consist of absolute return and alternative beta strategies designed to seek to generate more stable returns and greater downside protection with the goal of capturing both market risk premia (risk parity) and factor risk premia in a more efficient manner than traditional approaches.
PanAgora’s shareholders include the Firm’s employees and Great-West Life of Canada, a member of the Power Financial Corporation Group of Companies. As of January 31, 2020, PanAgora had approximately $42 billion of assets under management.
Philosophy
At PanAgora Asset Management, we believe that attractive risk-adjusted returns can be achieved through a disciplined, systematic approach to investing that capitalizes on the insights of talented investment professionals with diverse yet complementary backgrounds. The four key components of our overall philosophy are as follows:
Team: We believe that a team approach to investing fosters collaboration and compounds the value of insights contributed by any single member of our investment teams.
Research: We believe that creativity and innovation are the foundation of any credible investment process. We also believe a holistic approach to research that emphasizes identifying inefficiencies often overlooked by the mainstream of traditional academic research contributes to the development of more robust processes.
Process: We believe a process deploying quantitative techniques based upon sound fundamental insights, whether they relate to investor behavior, a company’s operations, macro-economic signals, micro structure variables, or other trends in the marketplace, is likely to generate more persistent performance than less disciplined approaches or those that rely too heavily upon statistical techniques without fully understanding the underlying factors that influence a security’s price movement.
Service: We believe in providing flexible investment solutions tailored to the evolving needs of our clients. We complement an array of attractive investment offerings with a high degree of transparency in an attempt to ensure our clients are comfortable with their understanding of the drivers of past performance and have proper expectations for the future. We focus on providing unfettered access to experienced client service and investment professionals and pride ourselves on providing accurate and timely communication with our clients.
Management Team
Investment Team
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Crowell Prize
1941-1998
Supporting academic research that furthers the field of quantitative management is a core tenet of PanAgora. Since 2001, we have sponsored the annual Crowell Prize, providing a forum for new and cutting-edge research that connects theory and practice. We believe this interaction contributes to the continued development of the science of economics and is a vital part of the development of optimal investment strategies. Each year, PanAgora solicits submissions from dissertation-stage graduate students and faculty at accredited academic institutions, as well as from practitioners working in the field.
PanAgora’s founder, the late Dr. Richard A. Crowell, was a pioneer in the field of quantitative investing. The concepts of asset allocation, risk management and portfolio selection models were in their infancy when Dr. Crowell began his career in the early 1960s. He was one of the first investment professionals to create an asset allocation model and one of the first to show how beta could be used to evaluate risk and control portfolios. Dr. Crowell earned a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967, and in 1973 won the Graham and Dodd award for his paper, “Five Uses of Beta.”
PanAgora Asset Management’s Quantitative Research Institute announces the Dr. Richard A. Crowell Memorial Prize paper competition. Please click here for more information.
The Crowell Prize has been awarded to many renowned academics over the past 17 years. Noteworthy winners have included:
Christopher Malloy, Professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Lauren Cohen, Professor in the Finance & Entrepreneurial Management Units at Harvard Business School and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Robert Korajczyk, Professor of Finance, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and a Principal and Investment Committee Member at Chicago Alternative Investment Partners.
Ronnie Sadka, Senior Associate Dean for faculty, chairperson and professor of Finance, and the Seidner Family Faculty Fellow at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College.
Leonid Kogan, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Professor of Management and a Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Andrew Ang, Head of Factor Investing Strategies and BlackRock’s Factor-Based Strategies Group