Bruce Jacobs Interview, “Jacobs Levy: The Art and Science of Investing”

Davos 2020, TBD Media, January 2020: This interview, conducted by veteran TV news anchor and foreign correspondent Andrew Wilson, appears on CBS News online. Bruce Jacobs explains the firm’s approach to investing, which combines the art that comes from intuition and experience with the science that comes from rigorous quantitative methods. He also describes 130-30 long-short and absolute return strategies, discusses the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles into the investment process, and cautions investors about certain aspects of today’s markets. Bruce notes that “we measure our success not by our assets under management, but by our performance for our clients.”

MIT, Harvard Professors Awarded Nobel Memorial Prize for Novel Poverty Studies

by James Comtois, Pensions & Investments, October 15, 2019: On the awarding of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, Bruce Jacobs notes that “the laureates’ work has had a profound effect on how development economics is pursued and has had direct effects on policy, including remedial support for schools in India and free distribution of medicine.”

Why a 1968 Paper Still Influences Modern Asset Management

Knowledge@Wharton, September 26, 2019: The Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation was awarded on Friday, September 27, to Ray Ball and Philip Brown, for their influential work linking stock prices to accounting data, outlined in their paper “An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers,” published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 1968... The biennial prize recognizes outstanding quantitative research that has contributed to an important innovation in finance. Bruce Jacobs, chair of the prize selection committee, noted that Ball and Brown’s article “opened the door to new methods of conducting empirical research in finance and, ultimately, innovations in the practice of finance.” Ken Levy, Jacobs Levy Center Advisory Board member, added that their “finding that abnormal returns continued in the expected direction even after the announcement of earnings was the first reported evidence of anomalous behavior in the context of the efficient market hypothesis.” Ball is the Sidney Davidson distinguished service professor of accounting at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Brown is a senior honorary research fellow in accounting and finance and emeritus professor at the University of Western Australia. The prize was presented at the annual conference of Wharton’s Jacobs Levy Equity Management Center for Quantitative Financial Research.