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William Gordon Ritter

Lecturer, Applied Analytics; Founder & CIO, Ritter Alpha LP

Gordon Ritter completed his Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Harvard University in 2007, where his published work ranged across the fields of quantum field theory, differential geometry, quantum computation and abstract algebra. Prior to Harvard he earned his Bachelor's degree with honours in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, where he was selected to take Honors Analysis and mostly graduate-level math and physics courses while still an undergraduate. Dr. Ritter's research interests are focused on portfolio optimization and statistical machine learning. He is in the top 10% of all authors on SSRN, and was named Buy-Side Quant of the Year in 2019, by Risk. In parallel with his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Ritter works full time in the industry; in 2019 he founded Ritter Alpha LP, a registered investment adviser. Prior to Ritter Alpha, he built a successful trading system from scratch at GSA Capital, a firm which won the Equity Market Neutral & Quantitative Strategies category at the Eurohedge awards four times. Prior to GSA, Dr. Ritter was a Vice President of Highbridge Capital and a core member of the firm's statistical arbitrage group, a team of less than 20 people which was responsible for billions in profit and trillions of dollars of trades across equities, futures and options with low correlation to traditional asset classes.

Education

  • Ph.D., Harvard University 
  • B.A., University of Chicago