Stefano Cavaglia completed a PhD in Finance at the University of Chicago in 1990. Since then he has been applying state of the art theory in the investment management profession. In 1998, under the mentorship of Gary Brinson and Jeff Diermeir, he led the restructuring of UBS Asset Management’s Global Equity investment platform with a view to emphasize the importance of industry factors in the construction of global equity portfolios. His team’s research work supporting the initiative was featured in the Financial Analyst Journal and is now referenced in the CFA curriculum. Subsequently, he founded and managed a $1.3b hedge fund at UBS O’Connor that provided further support for his empirical findings – featured in a CFA/U Virginia business case study.

Since 2009 he has been residing in Australia. He is presently Head of Investment Research at Findex where he manages $16b of high net worth client assets in multi-asset class portfolios. His team has developed factor based tools for evaluating managers and for building fund of funds portfolios both long only and long/short mandates. He has recently co-authored a research paper featured in the Journal of Portfolio Management that aims to quantify and measure the importance of downside protection embedded in the factor attributes of portfolios. His team is continuing to develop this multi-factor framework for managing risk and meeting client goals.