Engineer-Turned-Hedge-Fund-Manager on Keeping It Simple

Engineering involves solving complex problems, but one hedge fund manager who left the engineering field focuses on simplifying his investment process. In an interview with Hedge Fund Alpha, Christopher Gething of Atherean Asset Management shared a bit about his background and how as a one-man shop, he strives to keep things simple.

Gething is the founder, chief investment officer, analyst and portfolio manager at Atherean Asset Management, running the firm solo with no employees. He founded the firm about a decade ago after working for around seven years as a financial advisor at an insurance broker-dealer and then at a boutique international broker-dealer.

Background on Christopher Gething

Gething mostly grew up in New York, spending a small amount of time overseas.

“New York City has a way of amplifying trends in society, in all ways good and bad, and group-think can be very prevalent there,” he said. “Despite the fact that it is a global hub, it can be very provincial. As far as investing goes, I believe that growing up in an environment like that can train one to be able to see nonsense coming before it even starts.”

Before joining the asset management industry, Gething studied, researched, and worked in materials science and engineering, specifically, in the solid mechanics niche. It’s an area that involves the rational analysis of solids and structures for use in engineering applications, which can be as broad as analyzing stress in bridge girders to analyzing stress and heat transfer in interconnect lines in semiconductor wafers.

“The field involves a combination of mathematical theory, numerical modeling and experiments, and I was focused primarily on the theoretical and numerical aspects,” Gething explained. “While I loved the analytical rigor involved in this field, I did not want to spend the rest of my life working in a lab, building models, writing grants and writing papers.”