Sandy Rattray

I have recently stepped down as the CIO of Man Group plc, a quantitative and discretionary hedge fund manager based in London. We focus on applying technology and science to financial markets and our team of around 1,400 people includes scientists, mathematicians and engineers, many with PhDs. We run over $100bn of assets and so we are a very large fund manager. Our customers include pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowments in all regions of the world. I grew up with an interest in science, maths and computers and Man Group provided me with a way to apply these interests in a practical way with very quick feedback to decisions you make. I use the knowledge I gained at school and university on a daily basis and we have equations and bits of technology scattered around our office.
I grew up in many different countries around the world including Vietnam, the Sudan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Across our team we speak more than 40 first languages, but we all write code in one language – Python. I believe that both finance and technology are forces for good in society, not always a fashionable view!
We sponsor the Oxford Man Institute at the University of Oxford, and so I have a lot of dialogue with academics, but as a business person. The institute focuses on quantitative finance, and particularly machine learning.
I’ve written many academic papers and a book. I also co-invented something called the VIX, which is a measure of fear in financial markets.