Robert Kopprasch, Ph.D., CFA

Robert “Bob” Kopprasch is a Bates Consulting and Testifying Expert with 49 years of financial services industry experience, including sell-side, buy-side and analytics. Dr. Kopprasch recently retired as a Managing Director at fixed income portfolio management and analytics platform The Yield Book Inc., a division of Citigroup, where he worked on a variety of projects related to analytics, indices, training, modeling, and model validation.

Bob began his finance career in 1973 as an Assistant Professor in the business school at American University in Washington D.C., where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses in investments, capital markets, and financial decision making. After receiving tenure, Bob took leave to work at Salomon Brothers, where he ran the Hedge Group, which provided hedging solutions to clients and the trading floor. This group also did most of the valuation and education for new security types, which at the time included zero coupon bonds, options on fixed income securities, interest rate swaps, etc. While Bob never returned to American University, he began teaching again, this time bond mathematics (including option and futures pricing) to all new Salomon trainees.

In 1987 Bob left Salomon to become head of Goldman Sachs’ fixed income research group. While there, he and several colleagues wrote the first article on adapting Fisher Black’s portfolio insurance approach to the fixed income market. Bob left Goldman to join Hyperion Capital. While heading research at the firm, Bob also became a portfolio manager, running institutional fixed income accounts, primarily investing in MBS. The firm also did significant consulting to FSLIC and Bob was responsible for approving all hedging trades as several thrifts were being liquidated. When the entire team left to join Alliance Capital, Bob became head (co-head) of fixed income research at Alliance Capital (now Alliance Bernstein) and President of its derivatives subsidiary. Bob left Alliance in 1995 to join Smith Barney Capital Management as head of its institutional fixed income unit. In this role, he once again was managing MBS hands on, and continued to do this as Smith Barney merged with Salomon, and then with Citi. In 2002, Bob moved within Citi to The Yield Book, rejoining many of his former Salomon Brothers colleagues from the 80s. As head of Customer Service for Yield Book (a fixed income portfolio management and analytics platform), Bob wrote extensively on fixed income analytics, indexing, and portfolio management, and once again taught bond math to customers and new Citi associates in the training program. He was also responsible for Yield Book’s model validation program, required by the Fed.

Many of Bob’s articles have been included in investment textbooks used in the CFA program. More recently, Bob co-authored a chapter on active fixed income management for the CFA Level III program. He served on the Editorial Board of the Financial Analysts Journal from 1994 - 2009, as well as the Advisory Board of the Research Foundation of AIMR. Other work for the CFA Institute (formerly AIMR) included working on the fixed income specialization committee and the Level III fixed income curriculum committee.