Erkko Etula’s career begins with a small act of intellectual trespassing. At MIT he studied economics and physics, two disciplines fond of invisible forces and confident notation. Then Paul Samuelson, the Nobel-winning economist, suggested that the young Finn stop dividing his attention. Leave the physics, Samuelson advised, and focus on economics and finance. When Paul Samuelson tells you what sort of scholar you might become, ignoring him would be a rather flamboyant experiment.
Etula took the advice. He worked with Samuelson as a research assistant, collaborator and co-author. He graduated from MIT in 2005, Phi Beta Kappa, then stepped out of the American academic current and returned to Finland for military service in the Finnish Marines. He has described that year as a useful interval for reflection. Afterward came Harvard, a master’s degree, a Ph.D. in economics and a Presidential Scholarship.
There is a tidy version of this story in which an excellent student simply keeps collecting selective institutions. The more revealing version is about translation. Etula learned to move between physics and economics, Finland and America, theory and institutions. Each move asked the same question in a new dialect: what happens when elegant systems meet the untidy limits of the real world?
A crisis, observed from inside
Etula finished his doctorate in 2009 and joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as an economist in capital-markets research. This was an unusually vivid moment to specialize in asset pricing and the estimation of risk premia. The financial crisis had made balance sheets front-page material. Questions that might once have appeared safely theoretical - liquidity, leverage, the risk-bearing capacity of intermediaries - had developed a habit of interrupting dinner.
Those questions also ran through his academic work. With Tobias Adrian and Tyler Muir, Etula studied how shocks to broker-dealer leverage could help price returns across stocks and bonds. Other papers examined commodity returns, foreign-exchange risk and the predictable market effects of institutions’ month-end demand for cash. The subjects sound forbidding. Their common character is more human: institutions have needs, constraints and deadlines, and markets bear their fingerprints.
The research earned recognition, including an Amundi Smith Breeden Prize for capital-markets research and the 2016 Engle Prize in financial econometrics. It also gave Etula a durable lens. A portfolio is not merely a list of positions. It is the product of financing conditions, taxes, preferences, time and the machinery required to keep a plan intact.
The thousand-meeting education
In September 2010, Etula moved to Goldman Sachs. Over the next decade he became a managing director in the Investment Strategy Group and headed strategic and quantitative asset-allocation research. He helped design a factor-based approach used to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars, led systematic strategies managing billions, and helped launch large mutual funds. Those are the impressive nouns. The revealing number is more ordinary: more than 1,000 client meetings.
Meetings are where a model encounters a person with concentrated stock, tax consequences, family priorities and an entirely reasonable dislike of needless complexity. Etula saw financial advisors devising individual solutions while also trying to run growing practices. Personalization was valuable, but the work required to maintain it could become a brake on growth.
He left Goldman in July 2021 and co-founded Brooklyn Investment Group. The company’s name honored its home base, a borough the founders associated with independence and invention. Its business was less romantic and more useful: give advisors technology for customized managed accounts, automatic rebalancing, tax management and portfolio monitoring across equities and fixed income.
“Our platform delivers personalization and tax management across equities, fixed income, ETFs and MFs for each client, while helping advisors scale growth. We call this ‘Operational Alpha.’”Erkko Etula, 2024
The return on an hour
Operational alpha is a playful bit of financial appropriation. Alpha usually means return beyond a benchmark. Brooklyn used the word for the value created when a practice removes repetitive work. If software watches accounts, harvests tax losses, manages drift and produces reporting, the advisor recovers time. That time can go into planning, explanation and the delicate business of preventing a client from doing something dramatic on a bad Tuesday.
The idea contains an important division of labor. Algorithms are tireless monitors. Advisors understand why a client owns an odd position, fears a particular loss or wants a portfolio to reflect a particular conviction. The platform’s job is not to manufacture intimacy. It is to stop operational chores from crowding intimacy out.
Separate work that benefits from consistency from work that benefits from empathy. Automate the first. Protect the second. Scale can preserve personalization when the system is designed around that boundary.
Brooklyn’s architecture extended that logic into direct indexing. Instead of owning a fund as one indivisible object, an investor can own many of the underlying securities, allowing the account to be adjusted around taxes, exclusions, themes or existing holdings. Brooklyn also developed multi-asset accounts and tax-advantaged long-short strategies. Etula describes the latter as the marriage of two older ideas: tax-loss harvesting at the individual-security level and long-short portfolio construction.
The arithmetic comes with risks. Long-short portfolios can involve leverage, borrowing costs and losses on short positions; tax outcomes depend on the investor’s circumstances. Etula’s recent explanations emphasize layers of risk management - market exposure, tracking error and concentration risk - rather than treating a tax benefit as a magic trick. Finance has enough rabbits. What clients need is a clear view of the hat.
A partner becomes an owner
Nuveen and Brooklyn began a strategic partnership in 2023. Together they launched direct-indexing, long-short and multi-asset offerings, while a Nuveen affiliate took a minority stake in Brooklyn’s parent. The sequence mattered. The companies worked together before they combined, testing the fit in products and daily operations instead of relying only on courtship language and a handsome slide deck.
In June 2025, Nuveen announced that it would acquire Brooklyn Investment Group and its parent technology company. The transaction closed in July. In May 2026, Brooklyn Investment Group merged into Nuveen Asset Management, with the management of its strategies continuing under the Brooklyn investment team. Etula remained CEO and chief investment officer of that team, responsible for personalized managed accounts, direct indexing and tax-advantaged strategies.
The acquisition gave Brooklyn a larger distribution system and a broad investment shelf. It gave Nuveen software built for white-labeled personalization, account maintenance and tax-aware portfolio work. By August 2026, Etula was discussing a whole-portfolio solution spanning equities, fixed income, ETFs and mutual funds, with alternatives as a further direction. The startup had entered the institution, and the founder’s work became one of integration as well as invention.
“Team is everything, nothing ever goes according to plan, and when things get tough, remember to zoom out to see the bigger picture and laugh a little.”Erkko Etula on the founder’s view
Humility as a system requirement
Etula has called MIT transformational because it teaches humility: surrounded by formidable people, one quickly discovers how little one knows about the world. It is a useful confession from a quantitative investor. Models reward clarity, but markets punish the confusion of clarity with certainty. Startups apply the same lesson with fewer equations and more calendar invitations.
His own route contains enough variety to discourage a grand theory of career planning. A Finnish student goes to Wales, studies technical subjects in Espoo, crosses the Atlantic on scholarships, assists Samuelson, serves in the Marines, earns a Harvard doctorate, studies a crisis at the Fed, builds investment systems at Goldman, teaches at NYU and starts a company in Brooklyn. The plan, if there was one, behaved exactly as he now says plans behave.
Yet the aspiration remained surprisingly steady. As a young student in 2004, Etula said he wanted to work on global economic questions in central banking, investment banking, international organizations or research. He reached several of those rooms. Then he built a tool intended to make their accumulated sophistication useful in a smaller room: the one where an advisor and a client decide what money is for.
That may be the quiet charm of operational alpha. It begins in portfolio machinery and ends in reclaimed attention. Etula’s long route through modern finance has involved risk premia, factor models, cloud infrastructure and tax lots. The unit that ties it together is still the hour - where it goes, who gets it, and whether the system returns enough of it for people to think. It is a human dividend from an otherwise mechanical proposition.