Rees resigns from Baring to head new quant team at Schroders

Stephen Rees has resigned from Baring Asset Management (BAM) to head a new investment process team at UK asset management firm Schroders.

Rees was formerly London-based head of quantitative research at BAM – a UK-based asset manager with around £22 billion worth of assets under management owned by the Netherlands' ING. His new role at Schroders will involve working with fund managers to help them systemise those elements of their investment processes that can reasonably be quantified.

“A good investment management process should be a blend of the objective and the subjective,” Rees told RiskNews. “I see my job as optimising the objective stage, so that fund managers have parameters to work within to ensure performance consistency,” he added.

Top of Rees’s agenda is the introduction of security pre-selection techniques that reflect investment managers' philosophies and the development of risk management tools.

Rees’s move follows Mark Pignatelli’s promotion from head of pan-European equities to chief investment officer at Schroders last week. Prior to joining Schroders, which manages around £102 billion worth of assets, Pignatelli was head of European equities at BAM and had hired Rees in 1997 to develop portfolio selection and risk management tools.

While at BAM, Rees developed a novel style-based value-at-risk methodology. He has had several technical articles published in Risk and has been a protagonist in the debate about the appropriateness of different risk measures for active fund managers.

Rees will leave BAM later this month and begin at Schroders on September 30.