In 2015, Peter Akinwande ’25, then a top-ranked animal genetics student at his university in Nigeria, read a book on investment management during a school break and developed a keen interest in the field. He checked out all the books he could from the library, and eventually—despite the effort he’d put into his academic training—decided to pivot from biology to finance. As he wrapped up his undergraduate studies in 2018, he started messaging people in the field on LinkedIn, asking them to take a chance on him.
One Lagos-based investment firm eventually did, and the self-taught Akinwande soon demonstrated his acumen as a research and investment analyst. He subsequently became a trader at Quadratix and later a senior associate at Sankore Investments, both in Nigeria. One of his most memorable “calls” was to short Eurobonds in Ghana and go long on the same in Nigeria in 2022.
“That proved to be one of the best trades that year,” he says.
But Akinwande felt he could do better by studying with leaders in the field, including Yale SOM’s Tobias J. Moskowitz, whose work on so-called “momentum investing” had been particularly influential; and Jordan Brooks, an SOM lecturer and principal at AQR Capital Management known for his expertise in macro investing strategies.
A Swensen Scholarship in Asset Management established in memory of the late David Swensen ’81 PhD, Yale’s longtime chief investment officer, allowed Akinwande to attend SOM’s Master’s in Asset Management program.
“I’d had trouble getting a visa before, probably for funding reasons,” he says. “I really didn’t think I’d be able to come to the United States.”
SOM was appealing, he says, because “all the lecturers are practitioners and at the cutting edge” of their fields. In Brooks’s class, he adds, “almost everything he talked about were things you could implement directly.”
He says the quantitative analysis he learned at SOM will be a major part of his investment strategy going forward.
“Coming into Yale, I was a fundamentals guy—I thought, ‘You have to know the industry; you have to read all the 10-Ks,’” he says. At SOM, he realized this investing strategy would allow him to learn deeply about only a few companies, and quickly gained the quantitative skills and tools to build a more diversified and robust portfolio. “A quant can look at things from the portfolio perspective and see what’s best for the investor.”
SOM was the only school Akinwande applied to; and, like his first investment calls, his gut instincts about the school proved correct.
“The mantra I give for myself is: education, experience, entrepreneurship,” he says. “If you get the best education, you have the opportunity to have the best experience, and, in the future, I can think about launching my own fund back in Nigeria. For that, I needed to go to Yale.”
