Vice Chairman & Chief Risk Officer
Mr. Agas has 40 years of experience in finance, investment management, technology, and risk. In the early 1980s, Mr. Agas developed one of the earliest fully automated trading systems implementing information theory based algorithms optimizing portfolio risk vs return in the face of uncertainty. He managed the platform across long/short portfolios of commodities, financial futures, foreign exchange, and equity indexes, for his own account, private clients, and a private investment partnership.
Mr. Agas has made significant contributions to the field of sequential decision making, including: the development of the first closed form analytic solutions to Universal Portfolio Optimization and Universal Data Compression. Additional applications of these approaches include optimizing global climate policy and as explanation of human brain structures modeled for general artificial intelligence.
Mr. Agas has served as a thought leader in areas of systemic and technology risk and advised senior management at Credit Suisse and Barclays. Within the hedge fund industry, Mr. Agas has overseen technology, operational, and trading risk; designed multi-strategy fund models of portfolio derivatives comprised of: alternative strategies, proprietary cash management, synthetic asset class overlay providing multiple utilization of capital, and event-risk hedges; and led development of a trading and risk platform in conjunction with the National Stock Exchange of India. As CEO of TechCONOMY, Mr. Agas led the development of distributed high-speed processing technology targeting the computation of quantitative analytics for trading and risk management.
Mr. Agas graduated from Western College with Honors in 1974 and serves on the Advisory Board of the New Vintage Baroque Orchestra.