Mr. Robert Greer is the first person to define an investable commodity index and is a pioneer in explaining why commodity indexes are an asset class distinct from stocks and bonds. He developed one of the two common methods of explaining sources of commodity index returns and has spoken on this asset class on national television, at industry conferences and trade meetings globally, and at college lectures at Yale, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton and elsewhere. Mr. Greer spent eight years managing the commodity index businesses at Daiwa Securities, Chase Manhattan Bank, and J.P. Morgan before joining PIMCO in 2002 to build their inflation products business. Under his 13 years of leadership PIMCO’s commodity business grew from a single pilot account to become the world’s largest commodity investment management business, at one time responsible for $35 billion in accounts. During this time the other inflation strategies for which Mr. Greer had business responsibility, including inflation-linked bonds, real estate, and certain multi-asset strategies, also grew so that his lines of business included over $100 billion in assets under management.
Prior to building the commodity and inflation business for PIMCO and others, Mr. Greer spent a decade in the commercial real estate industry, and also spent many years in corporate finance and computer systems development. But for more than two decades Mr. Greer’s primary interest has been the business of commodity investment; so much so that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange has referred to him as “the godfather of commodity investing.” He has also published articles on the subject in The Journal of Portfolio Management, The Journal of Derivatives, The Journal of Alternative Investments, Pensions & Investments, and in the inaugural edition of the Global Commodities Applied Research Digest, for which he is also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board. He has consulted on the subject of commodities to the CIA, the Bank of England and the New York Fed, and participated in the CFTC’s Agricultural Roundtable in April 2008. Mr. Greer wrote and edited, The Handbook of Inflation Hedging Investments, oriented to the institutional investment community, which was published by McGraw Hill in December 2005. In addition, Mr. Greer wrote the foreword to the book, Intelligent Commodity Investing, which was published by Risk Books in 2007. He also co-authored Intelligent Commodity Indexing, published by McGraw Hill in 2012. Among other interests since retiring from PIMCO, Mr. Greer serves as a scholar-in-residence at the J.P. Morgan Center for Commodities, part of the University of Colorado Denver Business School, and is a member of both the Research Council and the Advisory Council of that organization. He is also a Senior Advisor for CoreCommodity, LLC and provides strategic consulting for companies in the physical commodity business. Mr. Greer received a bachelor degree summa cum laude in mathematics and economics from Southern Methodist University and was in the top 5% of his MBA class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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