Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing

Welcome back to another episode of Goldman Sachs Exchange's Great Investors. I'm Raj Mahajan, a partner at the firm, where I'm responsible for helping to build out the firm's capabilities to serve the systematic investing community. Today, I have the great pleasure of sitting down with one of the stars of our industry, Raffaele Savi, the global head of BlackRock Systematic, which is celebrating its fortieth year in the business. Raffaele leads leads BlackRock's quantitative investing teams across fixed income, equity, and factor investing in overseas, more than 317,000,000,000 in assets under

Thank you. I might clarify. I've been with the team for twenty years, so half of this fortieth, but the team itself has been serving clients for forty years, and thank you for having me here.

Let's just get right to it. Let's start early in your career. You started your career in Italy at Capitaglia. I did. And you eventually rose to become the CEO of Capitali Investment Management. Take us back to what drew you to finance in the first place, and how did those early experiences in Europe shape your investing philosophy?

Yes. It was a little bit of a mix of destiny and intent. I'm an electrical engineer by training, and actually I was interested. I was doing my dissertation in remote sensing. And then a set of circumstances, I ended up taking a class on derivatives, and this was sort of the early nineties, and I fell in love with finance. And so I decided to do my dissertation on the math of derivatives. There was some coding involved, and back then, that was enough to sort of being considered a quant. Today, it's much harder for young people entering the field now, I feel. And and then I ended up working in i

And then in 02/2006, you joined Barclays Global Investors or BGI, which merged with BlackRock in 02/2009. What motivated you to move to BGI? And then later, you stayed at BlackRock post the merger. Tell us more about your thought process in both of those inflection points.

Yes. So I left Italy when I was 35, which is a little late. I like to say that sort of I I do everything ten years after the best practice. A lot of people leave Italy to study, and then they come back after ten years in the industry to enjoy the quality of life. And I did a little bit the opposite. I worked at first ten years of my career in in Italy, then I moved. It was a personal set of circumstances. I met this woman. She's my wife. She's American. I was in love, and and she moved to London. And so I started cold calling a number of companies and not even in my wildest dream

You cold called BGI?

I cold called headhunters. I cold called companies. And then and then I got this offer from BGI, and I couldn't believe it because that's, you know, for people that are in my field, Grindold and Khan is the book that that we all started on. And so the idea that I could join that

firm Profound impact on our firm, on our industry.