Dr Urvish Bidkar

Dr. Urvish Bidkar is a quantitative investment professional with a background that bridges engineering and financial markets. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin (approximately 1990–1996), and transitioned into fixed-income quantitative work upon completing his doctorate.

His finance career began at Salomon Brothers (later Citigroup), where from 1996 to 2003 he worked on the YieldBook desk developing algorithms for pricing fixed-income securities. From 2003 to 2005 he was in Citigroup's Quantitative Analytics and Modeling group, building trading models and quantitative strategies for the emerging-markets cash trading desk. From 2005 to 2006 he served as Desk Strategist in the Emerging Markets group at Bear Stearns, managing a proprietary relative-value portfolio for the bank.

In 2006 he joined Bladex Asset Management as a Portfolio Manager, co-managing the Bladex Capital Growth Fund. When that team spun out of Bladex bank in 2013, he became a Founding Partner and Portfolio Manager at Alpha4x Asset Management LLC — a discretionary global macro manager led by CIO Manuel Mejía-Aoun alongside Bidkar and Fabio Izzo, headquartered in New York with an affiliate in São Paulo, Brazil, and roughly $150 million in AUM at its peak.

In 2016, Bidkar and Mejía-Aoun co-founded Aspire Macro, LLC in New York, where he serves as Co-Founder, Head of Research and Portfolio Manager. Together the pair have managed the Alpha4x Capital Growth Fund and its predecessor Bladex Capital Growth Fund for over a decade. He remains an active markets commentator, co-authoring pieces (e.g., with economist Ajay Shah) in *Business Standard*, including a September 2025 article on short-dated options.

• Discretionary global macro: Strategies are built around global themes combined with fundamental and quantitative analysis of individual countries and products.
• Four core asset classes: Positions concentrate in currencies, interest rates, sovereign credit, and equity indices — all liquid, institutional markets.
• Quantitative, model-driven process: Aspire Macro "structures investment strategies utilizing robust quantitative models," supplemented by tactical trading to pursue absolute and risk-adjusted returns while dampening volatility and generating alpha.
• Emerging-markets tilt: His career-long specialization in EM (Latin America in particular, reflected in the São Paulo affiliate and BRL-denominated fund) informs the firm's regional emphasis.
• Capital preservation: Funds aim for capital appreciation "while limiting downside risk."