Movers and Shakers – Peg DiOrio, Vice President and Quantitative Analyst for the Portfolio Engineering Group at Voya Investment Management, formerly ING U.S. Investment Management

When Voya’s Peg DiOrio describes the keys to her success overseeing quant for an entire group of investment managers, she uses a sailing analogy. “When you are part of a sailing crew, you have a job and you rely on others to do theirs. To be successful in business, you have to both respect and rely on your colleagues.”

Career Beginnings
Peg DiOrio taught high school math when she graduated college. As the newest teacher in school, she was assigned to some of the most challenging students. “One of my first classes was filled with high school seniors who were taking ninth grade math for the third and fourth time. They weren’t the most enthusiastic students, but it allowed me to try a lot of different ways to reach them. It taught me the importance of understanding my audience.”

In order to advance in the teaching profession, Peg had to get a masters degree. She enrolled in a then-new joint program between New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. DiOrio recalls, “Courant had long relied on training Department of Defense types in its masters programs.” When that source began to dry up, Courant looked for new opportunities for mathematical sciences and found it in the finance world. “I think the program is now called financial engineering,” DiOrio commented, but back then financial quant work was just getting recognized as a discipline.

There wasn’t a huge amount of academic work devoted to the finance and mathematics at the time, so she and her cohorts studied mathematical models from a range of other disciplines – physical sciences, social sciences, etc. “We studied models that described fish populations, neural networks and flu outbreaks.” She believes that applying math to a range of situations has been really useful in creating financial models that work in the real world.

“Finance is Just Math”
Peg’s study group at Courant included a student who was working at Sanford C. Bernstein. Her cohort’s commitment to developing models that accurately described the real world and his willingness to push for the best possible solution were inspiring. One day he told her, “You are smart. You should come work at Bernstein.”

Peg was intrigued, but a bit concerned that she lacked an understanding of finance. Her studies were in pure math and applied math. To that point her cohort said, “Finance is just math. You’ll figure it out.”

Learning Finance through Experience and Collaboration
Peg was assigned to work with a group of financial advisors who managed money for Bernstein’s high net worth clients. Part of her role was to run statistical reports for clients. “Some of our clients were unusual trusts – such as nuclear decommissioning trusts. It was a challenge because the goal was to have enough money to decommission the plant but not extra because additional funds would have to be returned to utility customers. It was also interesting because it was a time when decommissioning trusts were finally allowed to be invested in stocks. “We spent a lot of time looking at the right level of volatility.”

Peg found the Bernstein environment to be really collaborative. “A lot of our work was about making models better. We would test data with a new method to see if we would get a similar answer.” She also learned a lot from her colleagues. One colleague gave her a lesson on the historical price movement of Swedish utilities in order to show how a particular model could be improved. “I learned the importance of looking at models and data in the proper context.”

Another colleague posited, “What we do is as much a science as an art. It has to make economic sense.” He reminded DiOrio to focus on “what will get us to where we want to be and to stop when we are there.”

Perhaps the most important learning has been to remember how her work impacts others. “Clients are trusting us with their money. We need to be humble about how the math works. As a team, we ask each other constantly to poke holes in our theories. That way we get to a better result.”

DiOrio expanded her role when she moved to Voya Investment Management and joined their Portfolio Engineering Group where she serves as a Portfolio Manager for the Research Enhanced Index strategies and oversees quant modeling across a broad range of holdings.

She comments that the environment at Voya Investment Management is similar to the one she experienced at Bernstein in that it is very team oriented. “I was very lucky to find a group that was so like-minded. We build and test everything off our collective team knowledge. As one colleague says, ‘I keep information in your brain.’”

Using her Teaching Skills to Bring Women to the Profession
DiOrio remembers being the only woman in the room in 1993 and still finds that it is often still the case. “It’s a challenge to find women who have the background/interest and passion to do this sort of work.” She is very active in Girls, Inc., a non-profit that supports positive role models for girls and provides opportunities for education and experience in a variety of fields – particularly in STEM fields. She is a current mentor in the 3-year Voya Girls Inc. Investment Challenge. The program gives teams of girls across the country the opportunity to have a hands-on experience managing a $50,000 virtual portfolio. The winners get to invest the profits towards their education. (This is the start of our 3rd year so we haven’t won yet!)

By Beth Senko