NEW YORK — JPMorgan Fleming Asset Management has formed a "global quantitative council," becoming the latest — and largest — manager to jump on the risk-management band wagon.
The new council is headed by Harriett Baldwin, a managing director and head of currency management in the firm's London office. The group will comprise the 50 or so quantitative experts from all of JPMorgan's offices to share ideas and research, said Ms. Baldwin. They will meet three to four times per year and share ideas at other times through e-mail.
"JPMorgan has always had a deep bench of quants who all used to be in stand-alone departments," said Ms. Baldwin. "We rethought that model at the end of the '90s, and then we had quants in each individual department." Ms. Baldwin said when the firm merged with Bank One Corp. last year, it gained several new investment professionals, many of whom were quantitative researchers. In order to incorporate their ideas into the firm, the quant council was formed.
"There's been a lot of good quantitative thinking in our company. The goal here is a simple one: bring together all of these quant thinkers from across the firm who are often working on similar systems from around the world to share ideas and best practices. We believe there's always been strong demand for quantitative management; we've always used a combination of the arts and sciences."