Todd Smurl, CFA, Truett Majors, PhD, and Katherine Ensor, PhD, have all recently joined the investment firm Ascendant Advisers as it prepares to accelerate growth plans.
Smurl joined the company as President and Chief Compliance Officer. In this capacity, he will be responsible for the management and overall growth of Ascendant Advisors, LLC; the primary operating subsidiary of Ascendant Advisors Group. He also joins the firm as a member of the Investment Committee.
Todd joins Ascendant Advisors, LLC after four years at Consilium Wealth Consulting, a national consultancy he founded providing professional services to registered investment advisers, banks, and broker-dealers. Prior to Consilium, Smurl was with Compass Bank, where he served as Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Investment Management for the bank’s Wealth Management Group, overseeing approximately USD4 billion in assets under management. He holds a BBA from University of Central Arkansas and an MBA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Todd is a CFA Charterholder and is a member of the Houston Society of Financial Analysts.
Majors, PhD joins Ascendant Advisors, LLC as Vice President of Quantitative Investment Research. In this role he is responsible for the technical design and expansion of the firm’s quantitative research platform. Dr. Majors has spent nearly two decades successfully building and implementing quantitative and statistical research models with a variety of Texas-based investment companies, including: Seager Capital Group, Barbnet Investments, MSD Capital, LP, and HBK Holdings, LP. Majors is an experimental physicist whose early career in nuclear, solid state, and atomic and molecular physics led to instrumentation development for such facilities as CERN in Geneva and the Superconducting Super Collider, a ring particle accelerator in Texas.
Ensor, PhD joins Ascendant Advisors, LLC as a consultant.
Ensor is responsible for the technical development of the firm’s quantitative research models and its proprietary algorithms and key statistical routines embedded in those processes. Dr. Ensor is a leading author and researcher in statistical finance. She is chair of the Department of Statistics at Rice University, a position she has held since 1999. Dr. Ensor is also the founding, and current, director for the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES) at Rice University. Ensor earned a Ph.D. in Statistics from Texas A&M University. She also has a MS and BSE in Mathematics from Arkansas State University.
“We are excited to have such excellent talent as Todd, Truett and Kathy join our team as we pursue additional acquisitions and accelerate our growth plans," says Jim Lee, founder of Ascendant Advisors Group.
