Richard Kang has the experience of over 25 New York Stock Exchange listed ETF launches since May 2009. Richard was one of three founders and Chief Investment Officer at Emerging Global Advisors LLC based out of New York City which issued and managed ETFs with underlying exposures in emerging and ... more

Richard Kang has the experience of over 25 New York Stock Exchange listed ETF launches since May 2009. Richard was one of three founders and Chief Investment Officer at Emerging Global Advisors LLC based out of New York City which issued and managed ETFs with underlying exposures in emerging and frontier markets. The firm was founded in September 2008 and its first ETFs were launched in May 2009. As of September 30, 2013, their emerging market consumer ETF was ranked #1 (out of roughly 600 open ended funds including actively managed mutual funds) based on risk adjusted returns. In 2016, Emerging Global Advisors was acquired by Columbia Threadneedle, the investment arm of Ameriprise Financial.

Richard formerly blogged from 2006 to 2008 on everything about indexing and ETFs at The Beta Brief.  In the fall of 2016, ten years after starting The Beta Brief, Richard launched The Fireside Chat, a blog that comments on the future and the impact from the emerging worlds of global investing, new technologies and the modern global citizen.  A key objective is to provide new insights so as to find unique growth opportunities among these themes.

Over his 20 years of buy-side experience, Richard has had senior roles at a hedge fund, fund-of-hedge fund and an investment counseling firm that was one of the world's first ETF strategist RIAs.  He then pivoted to co-found both a US-based index provider and then an ETF issuer firm.  Richard currently advises on a US domiciled ETF focused on the emerging market internet and e-commerce space as well as several early stage startups in the fintetch and social networking fields (and those where these areas converge). 

Richard has earned the Financial Risk Manager designation from the Global Association of Risk Professionals and has recently taught the “Fundamentals of Portfolio Management” course at NYU's School of Professional Studies. He sits on FTSE's Country Classification Indexing Committee as well as the editorial board of Institutional Investors' The Journal of Index Investing, the only academic journal for the indexing and ETF industry.