Investment Team

Victor Melfa Jr

Vic has over 40 years of experience in investments and business and was the founder and President of a two time “INC. 500” Fastest Growing Company that was sold to a multibillion dollar IT company in the 1990s.  He’s a two time recipient of The Ernst & Young/Merrill Lynch Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist Award.  Vic also was a cofounder of a technology company that had a successful IPO on NASDAQ’s big board.  By the late 1990’s Vic started an early factor-driven investment firm that formed the roots of our firm today.  Mr. Melfa attended Fay School and St Mark’s School and completed his undergraduate studies at Northeastern University.  Mr. Melfa also holds several securities licenses; Uniform Investment Adviser Law Exam, General Securities Representative, Investment Company Products/Variable Contracts Representative and Uniform Securities Agent State Law Exam.

Victor Melfa III
Partner and Portfolio Manager

Victor designs equity and bond strategies, analyzes financial risk, and works closely with clients to build tailored portfolios that utilize our strategies. He is a member of Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge and an affiliated Research Student at the University’s Centre for Financial history, where his research examines early modern asset prices, portfolio choice, time varying risk premia, financial crises, and social structure. His dissertation focuses on a previously unknown 16th century Genoese Colony of central Sicily and its impact on asset prices, portfolio choice, and wealth distribution. Victor earned his Master of Science in Finance from Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, where his professors included Frank Fabozzi, Alessandro Rebucci, Jim Kyung-Soo Liew, and Nicola Fusari. He holds his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Babson College. Victor is a Municipal and General Securities Representative (Series 7), Series 63 and Series 66.

Education

  • Master’s in History Candidate, The University of Cambridge, Selwyn College
  • PhD Candidate, Economic and Social History, The University of Edinburgh, 2024 withdrawal
  • Master of Science, Finance, Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School
  • Bachelor of Science, Business Administration (Entrepreneurship concentration) Babson College

Fig Academic Board of Advisors

Professor Eric Jacquier, PhD
Strategist

Professor Jacquier is Factor Investing Group’s Investment Strategist. Eric enhances our strategies with deep quantitative analysis. His expertise is in quantitative portfolio management, risk and construction. He is a leader in the fields of volatility and risk forecasting, estimation theory, and the use of Bayesian and simulation methods in Finance, with numerous publications. Professor Jacquier has consulted extensively in the fields of portfolio and risk management, including on asset volatility modeling, incorporating regimes and long-term uncertainty in portfolio choice. He is an enthusiastic speaker and executive education course leader in risk and quantitative portfolio construction.

Bringing an academic focus to Fig, Eric is a Professor of Finance at Boston University School of Management where he teaches Risk management in the Mathematical Finance MSc and MBA programs. He held the Professorship in Derivative Securities at the University of Montreal Business School. Eric has also been a visiting professor at MIT Sloan and University of Pennsylvania Wharton, and was a Faculty member at Boston College and Cornell University. Eric has recently been appointed Executive Director of the MSc in Mathematical Finance and Financial Technologies at Boston University.

Education

  • Ph. D, Finance and Statistics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
  • MBA, UCLA, concentration in international business and finance.
  • Ingénieur (eq. MSc) SUPELEC, École Supérieure d’Èlectricité. Electrical engineering

Alessandro Rebucci, PhD
Economist

Professor Rebucci provides macroeconomic outlook as Fig’s Economist. He is a Professor in the research track at Johns Hopkins University, holding a joint appointment with the Economics Department of the Krieger School of Art and Science and the Carey Business School.

Alessandro’s published work in the fields of International Finance and Macroeconomics has been cited over 6,000 times. He is a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Faculty Research Fellow, a CEPR Research Fellow, and an ABFER Fellow. Prof. Rebucci is also affiliated with the Center for Urban & Real Estate Management and Globalization of Real Estate Network (University of Zurich) and the Centre for Applied Financial Economics (University of Southern California). He is Associate Editor for the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the Journal of Banking of Finance, and the Journal of International Money and Finance. Prof. Rebucci has had Visiting Scholar Positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Central Bank of Finland and Brazil, and the IMF Research Department. Prof. Rebucci held research and policy positions at the Inter-American Development Bank (2008-2013) and the International Monetary Fund (1998-2008).

Education

  • Ph. D, Economics, Queen Mary College, University of London
  • MSc, Economics, Bocconi University
  • Laurea in Economic and Social Sciences, Bocconi University

Jim Kyung-Soo Liew, PhD

Dr. Jim Kyung-Soo Liew is an Associate Professor of Finance at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. He has published pioneering research in the intersection of social media big data, blockchain, and financial markets. His most referenced work is about value and size factors, with over 1,000 citations. He was named Top 10 2023 US Quant & Finance Professors by Rebellion Research.

Classes taught include “Big Data Machine Learning AI,” “Crypto-Currencies and Blockchain,” “Advanced Hedge Fund Strategies,” and “Leading Entrepreneurship and Innovation”. He serves as the Chairman of the Johns Hopkins Innovation Factory and has received the Dean’s Award for Faculty Excellence 2015-2019. He is on the Editorial Board of The Journal of the British Blockchain Association, Journal of Alternative Investments and the Journal of Portfolio Management where he co-authored the most read Invited Editorial “iGDP?”.

Previously, Dr. Liew has been with the Carlyle Asset Management Group, Campbell and Company, and Morgan Stanley.

Education

  • Ph.D., Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School
  • M.Phil., Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School
  • B.A., Mathematics, University of Chicago

Francesco A. Fabozzi, PhD

Francesco is the Research Director of the Yale School of Management’s International Center for Finance. He serves as the managing editor of The Journal of Financial Data Science and the Director of Data Science at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. He has coauthored several books in investment management and quantitative methods, published by MIT Press, McGraw Hill, and World Scientific Press.  His research has been published in the Journal of Financial Econometrics, Journal of Derivatives, Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Journal of Portfolio Management, and more. His primary research interests include large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning applied to quantitative investing. He holds a BA in economics from Princeton University, an MS in financial analytics, and a PhD in interdisciplinary data science from Stevens Institute of Technology. Francesco was also a member of Princeton’s wrestling team.

Education

  • Ph.D., Interdisciplinary Data Science, Stevens Institute of Technology
  • Master of Science, Financial Analytics, Stevens Institute of Technology
  • Bachelor of Arts, Economics, Princeton University