Welcome to the website of Barr Rosenberg. This site will provide a place to learn more about the lengthy career of Barr Rosenberg as well as provide an outlet for Barr Rosenberg to offer his statistical insights and advice. You can read just a bit of his great history below and check back often for the latest blog posts!
Barr Rosenberg was born in 1942 in Berkeley, California. During his youth, he developed a love of mathematics and won a California statewide math contest in high school. This led to an invitation for Barr Rosenberg to the NSF-funded summer program in math education at U.C. Berkeley in the summer of ’59. This program opened up a world of opportunity for Barr Rosenberg.
Barr excelled due to his love of logic and insatiable curiosity. His systematic instincts are a big reason why he was able to reach U.C. Berkeley at just 16 years old. From 1959-1963, Rosenberg took more than 1-1/2 times the normal load of classes. Barr was extremely interested in risk analysis – systematic risk, in particular. He liked the idea that societal risk had a direct correlation with the projections of individual stocks and industry returns. During his studies, it became clear that different factors in capital markets favored certain kinds of companies at certain times.
After graduating with honors in economics, Rosenberg earned a Marshall Scholarship for graduate studies in the UK. After two years where he earned an M. Sc (econ) in econometrics at the London School of Economics, Harvard was the next step. During his three years of studies at Harvard, Rosenberg got married and earned his Ph. D in Economics. In 1974, just six years after his dissertation was completed, Barr launched Barr Rosenberg Associates, which quickly became one of the biggest consulting firms in the industry. BARRA was known for providing access to Barr’s unique investment risk model that predicted variances in individual stock returns. Clients would receive access to Barr characterizing their existing portfolio for risk exposure and attributing risk to individual stocks and other factors that may hurt returns. The portfolio would then enter an optimization system that would provide options for the best solutions to strengthen a portfolio and mitigate risk factors. Along with Andrew Rudd, Barr Rosenberg Associates would work to create a model that analyzed historical performance to appraise the likely cumulative results of a portfolio overtime.
Barr Rosenberg returned to Berkeley to teach and after becoming a full professor, founded the Berkeley Program in Finance. Rosenberg continued to teach until 1982. Along with his wife, Barr founded the Rosenberg Institutional Equity Management (RIEM) in 1984, now AXA-Rosenberg. The company’s success depended upon computer systems that modeled economic fundamentals and market valuations and optimized portfolios based on the information developed.
Never resting on his laurels, Barr Rosenberg started to look to develop ideas and compose related parents with his wife. Patent efforts include a series of four patents on efficient storage of items with individual time histories that are interrelated, for example by directed graphs. Some of the work is concerned with graphic display of information in diverse contexts. The core work is in fields of education, robotics, privacy within community, modeling human systems, and journalism. Patent applications are being developed and submitted, and patents have been granted and more patents are in the process of examination. Barr is working now on a new set of projects in this field, in part with the hope of helping to establish a second age of Quantitative Investing associated with news-dependent risk analysis and news themes.