Masters in Business · Oct 2, 2026 · 1h 6m · 55m saved
With Omar Aguilar, President, CEO and CIO of Schwab Asset Management
Schwab Asset Management runs nearly $2 trillion of the firm's more than $13 trillion in client assets, built by a chief executive who holds a Ph.D. in decision sciences rather than an MBA.
Most asset-management careers start in finance and pick up behavioral theory later, if at all. Omar Aguilar's started in Bayesian statistics, the math of updating beliefs as new information arrives, and he has spent the two decades since building that into how Schwab prices products, trains advisors and talks clients out of their own worst instincts.
"I always give the example of, trying to get to the airport. So you have your prior knowledge about how you and your own utility function, how early you want to get to the airport, how difficult that may be, the potential problems, the probability you'll miss the plane, and everybody has a different way to approach it." — Omar Aguilar
Aguilar helped build the $40 billion defined-contribution business at Financial Engines under Nobel laureate William Sharpe before joining Schwab in 2011, and has run both the investment side and the company itself since 2022, something almost no one else in the industry does.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 6 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
The 4% retirement withdrawal rule was never a real calculation, Aguilar said
He called it "a number that somebody picked out of the hat"
Schwab's dividend ETF hit $100 billion by refusing to chase the highest yield
35% of net new money in Schwab's ETFs now comes from outside Schwab clients
Private credit's problem has never been credit, Aguilar said — it's a liquidity misconception
AI will not replace financial advisors, but it could cut their admin time from 50% to 10%
Aguilar named four biases hurting investors right now: herding, recency, confirmation and home-country bias
Bitcoin at $16,000 and at $30,000 produced the same (wrong) confidence from the same people
Next year's test for the AI trade is profitability, not spending, Aguilar said
Schwab's three-rule fix for bad decisions: stay invested, stay diversified, stay disciplined
1. From Quant PhD to CEO
Aguilar's path to Schwab ran through a Ph.D. in decision sciences at Duke, where he was a Fulbright scholar, after a bachelor's in actuarial science and a master's in applied statistics in Mexico City. He applied for academic jobs in his last year of the program before taking an analyst role at Bankers Trust instead.
His doctoral research became the models he used to build currency and asset-allocation strategies on Wall Street
"Back then it was statistics. In terms of how you use those models for making decisions. The whole process of decision on their uncertainty was... the whole, research that I did." — Omar Aguilar
A chain of Wall Street mergers moved him through the next decade: Bankers Trust was bought by Deutsche Bank, which sent his group to Merrill Lynch Investment Management; after September 11, 2001, he helped build Lehman Brothers' private-bank asset-management arm, including its first alternatives sleeve of private equity, private real estate and funds of hedge funds; and when the 2008 financial crisis froze that business, he rebuilt ING's quantitative and systematic investing at a $20 billion, 15-strategy unit.
The 2008 crisis also pushed him back into academia, at Financial Engines, where he worked alongside Nobel laureate William Sharpe on a $40 billion defined-contribution business built around low-cost, buy-and-hold investing rather than market timing.
