Jess Stauth CIO Systematic Equity Strategies Fidelity
QuantVision 2026: Fordham’s Quantitative Conference
Jess Porter Stauth is Chief Investment Officer of Systematic Equity Strategies at Fidelity Investments, where she oversees a broad range of active and tax managed equity products. Based in Boston, she leads a multidisciplinary team of portfolio managers, portfolio engineers, and quantitative researchers focused on delivering strong investor outcomes through disciplined portfolio construction, risk management, and data driven alpha generation. She is responsible for strategic initiatives that enhance performance, improve tax efficiency, and strengthen portfolio resilience across market cycles.
With more than fifteen years of experience spanning quantitative asset management, fintech innovation, and financial data platforms, Stauth has built a career at the intersection of systematic investing and technology. Before becoming CIO at Fidelity, she served as Chief Investment Officer of Active Strategies at Geode Capital Management, where she further deepened her leadership in systematic portfolio oversight.
Earlier at Fidelity, she was Managing Director of Fidelity Labs, the firm’s internal incubator and venture studio, where she worked on fintech innovation and next generation investment solutions. Her experience uniquely bridges large scale asset management with startup agility and experimentation.
Stauth previously spent nearly six years at Quantopian, one of the pioneering crowd sourced quantitative investing platforms. As Head of Portfolio Management, Research, and Trading and later Managing Director of Research, she led a novel alpha generation process built on systematic signals sourced from a global community of data scientists and quantitative researchers. She joined Quantopian when the team numbered fewer than ten and helped scale its tools, analytics, and research framework as the community expanded from roughly fifteen thousand to more than three hundred thousand participants. She designed and refined algorithm selection methodologies to identify robust, out of sample investment strategies derived from the crowd.
Prior to Quantopian, Stauth held senior quantitative roles at Thomson Reuters and StarMine. As Director of Quant Product Strategy at Thomson Reuters, she worked on the development and commercialization of next generation quantitative research tools, including a strategic partnership with Palantir Technologies. As a Senior Quant Research Analyst, she led research initiatives across diverse market data sets, including fundamentals, earnings estimates, news analytics, institutional holdings, insider filings, fixed income data, and short interest. She built stock selection models that were later productized and demonstrated live performance. Her earlier work at StarMine focused on the research and design of quantitative stock ranking models, leveraging statistical modeling in R and large scale data management systems.
Stauth began her professional career in academia, completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, where she designed high throughput video acquisition and computational image processing systems for behavioral analysis. She was awarded the prestigious Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship. Earlier, she taught physics and chemistry at Concord Public High School.
She earned her PhD in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was active in scientific communication through the Berkeley Science Review. She holds a BA in Physics from Colby College and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Jess Porter Stauth brings a rare combination of scientific rigor, quantitative research depth, entrepreneurial experience, and executive leadership. Her career reflects a sustained commitment to advancing systematic equity investing through data science, disciplined portfolio construction, and innovation at scale.
QuantVision 2026: Fordham’s Quantitative Conference
