Aaron C. Brown is an American finance

Finance

"Finance" is often defined simply as the management of money or “funds” management Modern finance, however, is a family of business activity that includes the origination, marketing, and management of cash and money surrogates through a variety of capital accounts, instruments, and markets created...

 professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

, author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 and quant

Quantitative analyst

A quantitative analyst is a person who works in finance using numerical or quantitative techniques. Similar work is done in most other modern industries, but the work is not always called quantitative analysis...

. He wrote Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street', The Poker Face of Wall Street and A World of Chance (with Reuven

Reuven Brenner

Reuven Brenner is an economics professor, holding the REPAP Chair of Economics at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management.-Career:Over the last thirty years he has consulted for companies including Bank of America, Knowledge Universe, Bell Canada...

 and Gabrielle Brenner). He is a regular columnist for Wilmott Magazine

Wilmott Magazine

Wilmott Magazine is a mathematical finance and risk management magazine, combining technical articles with humor pieces. Each copy of Wilmott is 11 inches square, runs about 100 pages, and is printed on glossy paper...

 and Quantum Magazine.

He is best-known for the idea that the economics of modern global derivatives evolved from gambling games rather than older financial institutions, and that gambling remains at the core of economic life.

Biography

Brown was born in Seattle, Washington

Seattle, Washington

Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

 and graduated from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 (S.B. Applied Mathematics, 1978) and the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 (MBA Finance and Statistics, 1982). Both in college and graduate school he was a professional poker player and did active financial trading for his own account.

In 1982 he moved to New York and held a variety of financial jobs including portfolio manager

Investment management

Investment management is the professional management of various securities and assets in order to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of the investors...

 (Prudential Financial

Prudential Financial

The Prudential Insurance Company of America , also known as Prudential Financial, Inc., is a Fortune Global 500 and Fortune 500 company whose subsidiaries provide insurance, investment management, and other financial products and services to both retail and institutional customers throughout the...

), trader

Trader (finance)

A trader is someone in finance who buys and sells financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. A broker who simply fills buy or sell orders is not a trader, as they are merely executing instructions given to them. According to the Wall Street Journal in 2004, a managing...

 and head of Mortgage Securities

Mortgage-backed security

A mortgage-backed security is an asset-backed security that represents a claim on the cash flows from mortgage loans through a process known as securitization.-Securitization:...

 (Lepercq, de Neuflize), risk manager

Risk management

Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities...

 (JPMorgan Chase, Rabobank

Rabobank

Rabobank is a financial services provider with offices worldwide. Their main location is in the Netherlands. They are a global leader in Food and Agri financing and in sustainability-oriented banking...

, Citigroup

Citigroup

Citigroup Inc. or Citi is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Citigroup was formed from one of the world's largest mergers in history by combining the banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate...

, Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm headquartered in New York City serving a diversified group of corporations, governments, financial institutions, and individuals. Morgan Stanley also operates in 36 countries around the world, with over 600 offices and a workforce of over 60,000....

 and AQR Capital Management

AQR Capital

AQR Capital Management is a hedge fund founded in 1998 by former Goldman Sachs trader, Clifford S. Asness.-Description and history:The firm invests in public equity and hedges markets across the globe...

) and finance professor (Fordham

Fordham University

Fordham University is a private, nonprofit, coeducational research university in the United States, with three campuses in and around New York City. It was founded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York in 1841 as St...

 and Yeshiva

Yeshiva University

Yeshiva University is a private university in New York City, with six campuses in New York and one in Israel. Founded in 1886, it is a research university ranked as 45th in the US among national universities by U.S. News & World Report in 2012...

 Universities).

In 1998 he founded and ran a shareholder rights website (www.eRaider.com) linked to a public mutual fund

Mutual fund

A mutual fund is a professionally managed type of collective investment scheme that pools money from many investors to buy stocks, bonds, short-term money market instruments, and/or other securities.- Overview :...

 (The Allied Owners Action Fund). The fund took 5% positions in public companies while the website organized all institutional and retail shareholders in an attempt to influence corporate management.

See also

• Scott Patterson's
  Scott Patterson (author)
  Scott Patterson is a financial reporter who follows technology and complex trading strategies and how they affect Main Street. His work has also been featured in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Mother Earth News. He is an alumnus of James Madison University. He lives in New York City...
  
    The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (Crown Business, 2010) contains extensive accounts of Aaron Brown's career and credits him with ending the Quant Equity Crash of August 2007 by being the first quant manager to go back into the market.

External links

• Do Quants Destroy?
• Foreword to The Poker Face of Wall Street by N. N. Taleb (pdf)
• Risk versus Portfolio Management
• ERaider.com