Academics

William F Sharpe

- is the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford University 's Graduate School of Business. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1970, having previously taught at the University of Washington and the University of California at Irvine .  In 1996, he co-founded Financial Engines, a firm that provides online investment advice to individuals.

He was one of the originators of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, developed the Sharpe Ratio for investment performance analysis, the binomial method for the valuation of options, the gradient method for asset allocation optimisation, and returns-based style analysis for evaluating the style and performance of investment funds.

Investment strategy for the long term

Eugene F Fama

- is the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. His website states that his research activities include "theoretical and empirical work on investments; price formation in capital markets; corporate finance." Fama's finance research is very well known in both the economics and investment community. He set out to develop a comprehensive theory to explain why stock market prices fluctuate randomly.  He coined the phrase 'Efficient Market'.

His paper 'The Behaviour of Stock Market Prices', suggests that a stock broker should, by using all his available resources be able to consistently outperform a randomly selected portfolio of securities of the same risk.  Given that in any situation, the stock broker has a 50% chance of outperforming the random selection, even if his skills are non-existent, Fama concludes that analysts do not constently outperform a market, they keep it efficient.  All known and available information is already reflected in the current share price.

Kenneth R French

- is the Carl E. and Catherine M. Heidt Professor of finance at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.  He is an expert on the behaviour of security prices and investment strategies.  He and co-author Eugene F Fama are well known for their research into the value effect and the three factor model, an improvement on William Sharpe's single factor asset-pricing model (CAPM).  His recent research focuses on the tests of asset pricing, the trade-off between risk and return in domestic and international financial markets, and the relation between capital structure and firm value.

Robert C Merton

- is currently the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at the Harvard Business School.  Prior to joining the faculty of Harvard in 1988, he served on the finance faculty of MIT's Sloan School of Management for eighteen

years.  Professor Merton has been frequently recognised for his achievements in translating finance science into practices.  In 1997, Professor Merton received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Myron Scholes for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.