Even the serene towers of academia, it seems, have been rattled by the shifting landscape of global markets, and André Perold, the George Gund Professor of Finance and Banking at Harvard Business School, is as taken aback as anybody. This may be because Perold is no mere professor but an investor of some stature as well. He is chief investment officer at $1.8 billion Boston-based HighVista Strategies, an endowment-style fund he helped launch in 2005 with $630 million in assets under management and whose holdings include hedge funds. Perold, 56, has long been an ardent student of the markets and a prolific researcher. In his 29-year tenure at Harvard, he has published scores of papers and case studies on topics as varied as derivative instruments, currency hedging, quantitative investment modeling and portfolio asset allocation. Never has he seen anything quite like this year’s credit meltdown, the collapse of U.S. investment...
