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Pankaj Agrrawal, Ph.D., joined the University of �������� Business School in 2005, with nine years of executive experience in quantitative research and portfolio management. Previously he was portfolio manager and director of research at global asset management firms based in San Francisco, Boston, London, and Philadelphia. Over that time he also designed and taught doctoral/graduate finance courses at Golden Gate University (DBA 821, Financial Theory), Harvard Extn. (Finance CSS 318), and Drexel University (Executive MBA). He also completed the “Investment Decisions and Behavioral Finance” executive education certificate course at the JFK School at Harvard University in 2001, and attributes that exposure to his interest in Investor Sentiment theory.

Dr. Agrrawal has published peer-reviewed papers in the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Behavioral Finance, Mathematics, Managerial Finance, JFP,  JRFM, PLoS One,  Journal of Investing, among others. He was quoted by the  on July 9, 2011 for his research on an algorithmic misspecification afflicting most web charts, in 2024 that was included in . His research on the inclusion of real estate ETFs in a multi-asset portfolio was featured in the  on January 11, 2019. In 2012, he developed and released the   via Apple’s App store. The app, which has been downloaded in 35 countries, rectifies the performance ranking problem and provides Total Return charts on over 20,000 stocks, ETFs, and indexes globally, his students have free usage of the app.

His research has been cited in , , Journal of , Physica A, , Financial Analysts Journal,  among others. His research has also been referenced on the Frankfurt-DAX stock exchange website, and his biography included in the Marquis Who’s Who in Finance and Industry (1999). In 2006 he was elected to the membership of the CQA (Chicago Quantitative Alliance). He is an active reviewer for peer-reviewed journals including the 

In 2013, he was listed on Yahoo! Finance in an article by ETFdb.com on “”&�Բ�����; and referenced in this University of �������� press release.  The University of �������� press release on his PLoS One paper (2017) linking market sentiment to human sentiment and subsequent suicides can be seen here.

Dr. Agrrawal values mentoring his undergraduate and graduate students and strives to inspire them with the workings of the capital markets and its computational aspects. He enjoys tennis, cricket, fitness, photography, volunteering () and being with his family in��.

Awards

His paper on IPO pricing and also on a Trigonometric test for portfolio efficiency��received the Best Doctoral Paper Awards at the 1995 and 1996 SWFA conferences in Houston and San Antonio, Texas.

Inducted into the business honor society��in 1996.

In 2007 he was the recipient of the Salgo summer research grant as well as U��������’s SGA Outstanding Faculty Advisor award.

In 2009, his proposal for ETF Betas on Financial Websites was selected for the Summer Faculty Research award by the��University Faculty Research Funds��Committee (later published in the JOI).

He is also one of the recipients of the 2009 U����������Faculty Technology Stipend, that was utilized to develop a browser-free live portfolio tracker.

In April, 2010 he was the recipient of the MBS Dean’s Faculty Research paper award for his ‘’��paper and the Dean’s summer research grant.

In April, 2011 he received his tenure and that year he was also the recipient of the Dean’s Faculty Research Excellence award for the JBF 2010 paper.

Three of�� his papers have been on the��‘most read’ lists��of the published journals.

He received the Dean’s Faculty Teaching Excellence award in April 2012.

In April 2013, the �������� Alpha Chapter of����recognized him with the��SigEp Faculty Member of the Year award, for his work as a professor at the �������� Business School and commitment to the students of the University of ��������.

In Spring 2016, he was inducted into the national��honor society. Established in 1897 the society “recognizes and encourages superior scholarship.”

2019: Promoted to Full Professor (Finance) and appointed the Finance Discipline Area Coordinator (2 years)

2020 and 2021: Faculty advisor to two MBS teams that won the��CFA Research Challenge��State championship

In 2021, he was appointed the Nicolas M.��Salgo��Professor of Business.

Research Interests

A central theme of Dr. Agrrawal’s research is developing multi-constraint optimized long-short market-neutral hedged portfolios using ETF’s as primary assets and harvesting financial information on the web. Other research interests include the role of cognitive biases and heuristics in the decision making process as applied to the capital markets, stable covariance and correlation matrices on ETFs, and devising alpha-return techniques that utilize portfolio risk exposures to drive returns. Portfolio Optimization, Risk Management, Beta Neutral Hedging, Sentiment Estimation, Time series analysis, Liquidity modeling, Cointegration vectors, and Risk Parity portfolio strategies are some of his other active interests. Some of this research can be seen on his website at .

Since 2004, he has been tracking a multi-asset class ETF portfolio (long-short and long only) that he discusses with his undergrad and MBA students. It continues to outperform the broad market equity and bond indices on both the dimensions in the risk-return space. It was included as a research chapter in the book “The Most Important Concepts in Finance”&�Բ�����;. A proponent of Multi-asset investing using the 1/n approach, he uses the MV optimization approach to identify optimal allocations. In 2024 he began work in AI chatbot development and integration into his classes. He also works with Python to develop ML dataframes for financial analysis. .