About us

History

FORT is an alternative investment management firm founded in 1993 exclusively committed to quantitative investment strategies. The firm is based in Washington D.C. and manages approximately $1BN on behalf of institutional investors globally, including pensions, endowments, foundations and sovereign wealth. Over the firm’s 29 year history, FORT has developed trading strategies in two main areas: quantitative futures and quantitative equities. FORT’s investment philosophy is defined by a deep understanding of market behavior combined with robust statistics to produce systematic methods of capturing market inefficiencies created by flaws in human behavior.

Founders

Yves Balcer

Sanjiv Kumar

Yves Balcer

PH.D., CO-FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL

Yves Balcer is a co-founder and a principal of FORT. Yves is responsible for strategy research and new research initiatives.

Prior to founding FORT, Yves was a Senior Manager of Investments at the World Bank from 1985 to 1992. During his last two years at the World Bank, Yves directed the research and implementation of system-based trading strategies in global bond markets. Earlier at the World Bank, he served as Senior Manager for the North American, European, and Asian portfolios where he managed teams of professional traders overseeing a multi-billion dollar portfolio in fixed-income assets. Between September 1987 and April 1988 Yves took a short leave from the World Bank to serve as Director of Research and Arbitrage at Midland-Montagu Securities. From 1977 to 1985, he was a tenured associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. Yves has published more than 25 articles on finance and economics in professional journals.

Yves holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Finance from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Ph.D. in Operations Research and a MS in Statistics from Stanford University, and a MS in Mathematics from the Université de Montréal.

Sanjiv Kumar

PH.D., CIO, CO-FOUNDER, AND PRINCIPAL

Sanjiv Kumar is the CIO, co-founder, and a principal of FORT. Sanjiv is responsible for strategy research and new research initiatives.

Prior to founding FORT, Sanjiv was a Senior Manager of Investment at the World Bank from 1987 to 1992. During his time at the World Bank, he managed large fixed-income portfolios in a number of major currencies and was responsible for investing a multi-billion dollar portfolio in US and Canadian Dollar securities. From 1985 to 1986, Sanjiv was the Vice President of Free Market Inc., a Chicago-based economic and financial advisory firm for institutional money managers.
 
Sanjiv has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Delhi.