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WorldQuant University instructor Maurizio Tiso, PhD, has more than 20 years of experience as a stock analyst and portfolio manager. But he knew little about financial markets when he joined the industry in the 1990s.

His global career started in Padua, Italy, where Maurizio was born. He later moved to Venice, Italy, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in econometrics and mathematical finance at Università Ca'​ Foscari Venezia before coming to the United States to continue his studies.

He quickly learned about financial markets after finishing a PhD in statistics at the University of Minnesota. One of his professors was launching a hedge fund and invited Maurizio to collaborate with him.

“I didn’t even know what a hedge fund was,” Maurizio said during a recent interview in New York City, where he now lives.

The work sounded interesting to Maurizio, who enjoys looking for patterns in data, so he agreed to give it a try. What followed was early-morning start times and long hours as Maurizio learned the business. Later, he applied his skills at investment banks and brokerage houses in New York, London, Monte Carlo, and Switzerland. Once he started putting theory into practice, his research paid off.

“It was not unusual for me to wake up and discover I had earned millions of dollars for my employer, just because I was right about something,” he said.

Maurizio recalled one buyout offer in the news that seemed low. His research suggested that two additional competitors might show up with higher bids, which turned out to be correct. He got the news of a big payoff early one morning in Brussels, Belgium, where he had traveled to meet an attorney about an unrelated matter.

Other days were harder.

“It’s not like I always got it right,” he said. “Sometimes, I got it wrong too, and in the beginning I was very stressed about that.”
He said his boss pulled him aside early in his career and gave him some good advice to avoid burning out. “If you expect to always be right, you’re going to die before you even get to 40 because you’re going to be so stressed,” his boss said. “I hope that you are right more often than you are wrong, but nobody can be right 100 percent of the time.”

The mentoring gave Maurizio perspective and allowed him to continue. He pays it forward by sharing his knowledge as a tutor and instructor.

“I decided I wanted to pass along a little bit of the experience I had gained over the years, so I started tutoring,” he said.

One of his students introduced him to WorldQuant University, and Maurizio joined the instructional team in 2022. Today, he teaches financial markets, financial data, and portfolio management in the Master of Science in Financial Engineering program.

“The courses are very modern,” he said. “They are not just based on some classic way of teaching. There is an emphasis on modernity and teaching things that are not even quite completely adopted yet.”

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