As co-founder of QM Advisors, Darren Heil has helped develop a firm that fixes what he believes is broken in our industry. At most financial advisory firms, you don’t have direct access to the people managing your money. At, QM Advisors you do. At many investment firms, you are either given a Modern Portfolio Theory allocation of money managers by a salesperson with no real access to the money manager or you buy into a “black-box” that you just have to trust will work and have no understanding of what that box really does. At QM Advisors, we are breaking the old business model and introducing a business model for our 21st century, highly transparent and fast-moving world. We give clients full transparency into our process of money management and direct access to the money manager. As co-founder, Darren has helped formulate investment policy, develop models, supervised the management of client portfolios, and most importantly, helped clients understand the investment philosophy so they can understand what is going on in their accounts. However, money management is only one part of the equation. The more important part is YOU and your personal process for making decisions.

Prior to QM, Darren earned two engineering degrees from Cornell University, including a master’s in engineering management. While in college, he also founded, raised money, and managed a private investment fund that was designed to take advantage of mispriced options on large technology companies. Seeing the opportunity and using math to solve the “problem”, is where his love affair with trading and managing money was born. His time at Cornell provided Darren with a strong foundation for understanding advanced math concepts, computer programming, decision science, and modeling. He was able to take theoretical concepts learned in his courses and put them to use in his private fund. It was this experience that allowed him to jump into a role as a trader with a multi-billion-dollar firm in New York.

Early in his 20-year career, Darren was a successful trader at two financial firms in New York. However, this was interrupted by 9/11 as his office was part of the World Trade Center Complex in lower Manhattan. As you can imagine, this experience caused a lot of soul searching and rethinking of priorities. He decided to take what he thought would be a short break out of the city and away from Wall Street. Darren returned to Atlanta where he co-founded a series of companies in both the management consulting space and travel technology space. Darren’s short break would not end up being so short, but in 2010 the money management world was calling again.

In 2010, Darren returned to the financial services industry, working for a large traditional investment company. Most recently before founding QM Advisors, he was on the other end of the spectrum working at a small independent Registered Investment Advisor that focused on a "black-box" tactical money management system. Over the years, Darren has worked with large clients and small clients and most everything in between. In doing so, he has learned a few truths. First, if you have a lot of money, you get access to the money managers who are willing to talk to you and open up their process….pretty much everyone else, for the most part, is in the dark. Second, and probably most important, is that the typical investor does not understand their personal decision-making process and the biases that lead them to make emotion-driven investment decisions (and non-investment decisions). Those emotional decisions often lead to poor investment results, regardless of how good the money management has been.

So, being the engineer and Charter Market Technician (CMT) that he is, in 2018 Darren decided to co-found QM Advisors with a focus on using behavioral finance, coaching, and the money management techniques he has learned over his career to help individual investors compete with the big institutions, and hopefully get where they want to go.

Investing and helping people achieve their goals are only a couple of Darren’s passions. Darren has returned to his roots in Peachtree City where he lives with his wife and two soon-to-be teenage children. His family attends Peachtree United Methodist Church. He is active in his children’s lives helping with their tennis, gymnastics, and music pursuits. Over the years, Darren has been active in the community and has served on several non-profit boards. He tends to spend his downtime pursuing various sports, playing and enjoying music, learning, and spending time with his family.

 

To contact Darren, please call (678) 570-4195 or
send email to: dheil@qmadvisors.com
 

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