Reception: 5 PM
Dinner: 6 PM
Presentation: 6:10 PM with Q&A
Burton Gordon Malkiel is an American economist and writer, most famous for his classic finance book A Random Walk Down Wall Street (now in its 12th edition, 2015). He is a leading proponent of the efficient-market hypothesis, which contends that prices of publicly traded assets reflect all publicly available information, although he has also pointed out that some markets are evidently inefficient, exhibiting signs of non-random walk.
Malkiel in general supports buying and holding index funds as the most effective portfolio-management strategy, but does think it is viable to actively manage “around the edges” of such a portfolio, as financial markets are not totally efficient.
Malkiel is the Chemical Bank chairman’s professor of economics at Princenton University, and is a two-time chairman of the economics department there. He served as a member of the Council of Economic Adviser (1975–1977), president of the American Finance Association (1978), and dean of the Yale Scholl of Management (1981–1988). He also spent 28 years as a director of The Vanguard Group. He currently serves as Chief Investment Officer to software-based financial advisor, Wealthfront Inc and as a member of the Investment Advisory Board for Rebalance IRA.
In 1949, Malkiel graduated from Boston Latin School, and went on to receive his bachelor’s degree (1953) and his MBA (1955) from Harvard University. He originally went into the business world, but had always had an interest in academic economics and eventually earned his doctorate (1964) from Princeton University.
