| Kritzman, Froot and Shelton: mining the fund-flow data from $8.5 trillion of assets under custody |
A quiet suburban street a few blocks from a university campus is not where you'd expect a groundbreaking research shop to be set up. But that is where State Street has sited the headquarters of State Street Associates, a 55-person subsidiary set up in 1999 to organize expansion into research provision for institutional investors. The buildings are two regular-looking houses in Cambridge, the Boston suburb most famous for Harvard University.
One of them belongs to Mark Kritzman, one of State Street Associates' three senior partners, It's from there that he also runs his own firm, Windham Capital Management Boston, a forex investment fund. The house next door is the data centre for State Street Associates.
The firm was set up in 1999, formalizing a process that first began in 1995 of starting to "analyze the behavioural elements of finance," to use the words of Stan Shelton, an executive vice-president at State Street and another senior partner at State Street Associates. "It's unique," he says.