Igor Tulchinsky

Igor Tulchinsky (born 1966) is an investor, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author and philanthropist.^[1] He is the founder, chairman and CEO of WorldQuant, a global quantitative asset management firm with over $7 billion in assets under management that he founded in 2007.^[2][3]

Igor Tulchinsky
Speaking at the 2023 World Economic Forum
Born	1966 (age 58–59) Minsk, Belarus SSR, Soviet Union
Education	University of Texas Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Occupation(s)	Investor, writer, philanthropist

Early life and education

Tulchinsky was born in 1966 in Minsk, Belarus SSR, Soviet Union.^[4] His parents were both professional musicians.^[1] In 1977, the family immigrated to the US where Igor had the chance to learn more about finance and computer science.^[5][6] He holds an MS in computer science from the University of Texas, and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.^[7][8][1]

Career

Tulchinsky started his career in 1988 at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he held the position of scientist for over three years. Prior to this, he spent time as a video game programmer.^[1]

In the early 1990s, Tulchinsky worked as a trading strategist for Timber Hill (now part of Interactive Brokers), before moving to Millennium Management, an investment management firm that manages more than $57 billion in assets.^[1][9]

He spent 12 years at Millennium as a statistical-arbitrage portfolio manager^[10] before he founded WorldQuant in 2007.^[1] WorldQuant has a global workforce of more than 1,000 employees across 24 global offices,^[11] with many locations in nontraditional financial centers, including Ramat Gan, Budapest, Mumbai, Ho Chi Minh City and Seoul.^[1][12] This is in line with Tulchinsky's stated belief that "talent is distributed equally around the world, opportunity is not."^[1]

In 2014, Tulchinsky founded WorldQuant Ventures, an early-stage investment vehicle that invests in tech companies with a particular focus on data analytics and finance.^[13][14]

In 2014, Tulchinsky founded WorldQuant University, a US-accredited not-for-profit university, which offers an entirely free online master's degree in financial engineering and a data science module.^[15][1][16]

In early 2018, Tulchinsky founded WorldQuant Predictive, an artificial intelligence platform company that sells predictive analytics to corporate clients.^[1]

Philanthropy

In 2017, Tulchinsky made a gift of $5 million to launch the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction at Weill Cornell Medicine.^[17] This research initiative aims to enhance current methods used in precision medicine by combining molecular profiling with financial algorithms.^[18] He is also a Board of Fellows member at Weill Cornell Medicine.^[19]

Publications

In 2015, Tulchinsky published Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies,^[20] and in 2018, he published The UnRules: Man, Machines and the Quest to Master Markets.^[21][22] In 2023, he released his third book The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk, co-authored with Christopher E. Mason.^[23][24]

Tulchinsky has published material for and commented across various global organizations, publications and think-tanks, including the Financial Times,^[25] The Wall Street Journal,^[26] World Economic Forum,^[27][28] Milken Institute,^[29][30] Harvard Business Review,^[31] Institutional Investor^[32] and Fox Business.^[33]