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Bruce Collins, Ph.D.
Bruce Collins is a financial economist, college professor and social entrepreneur. Dr. Collins is a Full Professor of Finance at Western Connecticut State University and is also Executive Director of OUR PARK PLACE, a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the health and development of children by providing playgrounds and recreation facilities. He received his B.A. in Political Science and Economics and a Ph.D. in Economics from Fordham University. In his graduate studies, Dr. Collins specialized in Monetary and Financial Economics. His Ph.D. thesis was supported by a grant from the Columbia Futures Center, Columbia University.

He worked on Wall Street most notably for Shearson Lehman in the 1980s where he contributed to ushering in a new age of technology and quantitative analysis. Dr. Collins worked first in the Analytic Systems Group at Morgan Stanley where he reported to Gregory Kipnis and Nunzio Tartaglia. This was the group that institutionalized Gary Bamberger’s original “pairs trading” system. This was the beginning of the statistical arbitrage strategy that would development into an acknowledged hedge fund strategy in the 1990s. It was also the group that hired a young Columbia University computer scientist named David Shaw. While at Morgan Stanley, he worked closely with Kipnis in developing an extensive portfolio of pairs across the US equity universe.

After Morgan Stanley, Dr. Collins founded a quantitative department, Index Products Research, within the Institutional Equities Division of Shearson Lehman in the mid 1980s. He hired a small group of “quants” with backgrounds in mathematics, engineering, physics and neural biology. The group introduced UNIX based systems, LANs and other technologies that ultimately contributed to changing the way Wall Street employed technology within business units. This was the age that moved from Main Frame solutions to LANs.

Since the early 1990s Dr. Collins has taught at Western Connecticut State University in the Finance Department. He was the Chair of the University Planning and Budgeting Committee for three years and helped introduce a more rigorous method of allocation for the university. Dr. Collins also was instrumental in revising and updating the finance curriculum to include a traditional corporate finance track and a financial markets and investments track. Perhaps, more importantly, Dr. Collins worked with a student with tremendous computing skills, Alberto Swett, to develop the first fully functioning web site at the university. The Finance Department web page in 1995 was among the first to use a graphic interface and real time stock pricing. Their pioneering work lead to the recruitment of Mr. Swett by the university to development its firs web pages and subsequently to the his hire by Microsoft to develop World Wide Web applications. He has authored numerous works on equity derivatives mostly in professional books that have help educate a generation of professionals on the use of equity derivatives. He is the author with Frank Fabozzi of Derivatives and Equity Portfolio Management. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Portfolio Management, the Financial Analysts Journal and the Journal of Quantitative Analysis and Accounting.

Dr. Collins has been a consultant to Siemens AG in the development of their fin4cast group. The Siemens fin4cast Group develops and applies a variety of quantitative prediction models that are used to create investment products across four asset classes – stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities. Siemens fin4cast was created within the Program and System Engineering (PSE) Division in Vienna, Austria. He worked with the one of the founders of fin4cast, Dr. Martin Kuehrer in developing an appropriate business model for the group after they had developed state of the art forecasting models.

In 2008, Dr. Collins co-founded OUR PARK PLACE, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health and development of children by providing playgrounds. He is currently working on building this organization and in conducting research on the current state of children’s health and what we can do to improve it.

Books
1999