Rob Arnott has built a long, impressive career, first as a Salomon Brothers strategist, then a quantitative investment manager, and in 2002, just after the dot-com bubble, as founder of Newport Beach, California–based Research Affiliates.

Research Affiliates builds indexes structured around factors, choosing to weight stocks more or less heavily because of characteristics other than market value. Arnott soon established himself as an iconoclast—a champion of emerging markets when the asset class had been left for dead; popularising the term “smart beta,” a term everyone loves to hate; and, after factor investing had gone mainstream, publishing a treatise titled “How Can Smart Beta Go Horribly Wrong?”