Why China's 'goddess' of quants isn't fazed by global fund giants

Li has spent a decade honing an approach that beat the benchmark index in all but two of the past 10 years

As China opens its $15 trillion asset management industry to the world, some of the biggest names in quantitative investing are racing to put money to work.

Li Xiaowei has a nearly 10-year head start.

Known in local trading circles as the “goddess of quants,” the 49-year-old Stanford PhD started China’s first enhanced index fund in December 2009 and has trounced the market by 56 percentage points since the product’s inception. She sees little reason to worry about losing her edge as overseas giants from BlackRock Inc. to D.E. Shaw & Co. expand in China.

“Foreign institutions are quite sophisticated,” said Li, who