After completing his PhD, Asness accepted a job with Goldman Sachs as managing Director and Director of quantitative research for Goldman Sachs Asset Management. At Goldman, he founded the Goldman Sachs Global Alpha Fund, a systematic trading hedge fund and one of the earliest "quant vehicles" in the industry. The fund used complicated computerized trading Models to first locate underpriced equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities and then use short selling to take advantage of upward or downward price momentum. The fund was designed to make money regardless of the direction the market was moving. In 1997 he left to found AQR Capital Management.