Harry Markowitz: the Father of the Modern Portfolio Theory
For thousands of years, people knew the concept of diversification. People also throughout history knew intuitionally the concept of risk. The person who first measured what financial risk really means and how this is related to financial return was Harry Markowitz, the father of modern portfolio theory (also known as mean-variance analysis).
Biography
Harry Max Markowitz (born in 1927) in Chicago, Illinois, is an American economist and professor at the University of California. He was born in Chicago, and he graduated from the University of California, where he studied under important economists like Milton Friedman.
The University of California is world known for its economics department. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are just a few of its Nobel-price winners.
Professor Markowitz wrote “Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments” in 1952 and was published in the Journal of Finance in the same year. Many attribute this work to the beginning of the quantitative finance field.
In 1954, he received his Ph.D. om Economics from the same University, and after 36 years, in 1990, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
