My Dinner with Harry Markowitz, The Father of Modern Portfolio Theory
The personal side of the man who shaped the investments industry: Harry Markowitz, 1927–2023
Imagine a little league baseball player who suddenly found himself in a game of pick-up with Joe DiMaggio, hanging-out for hours together, hitting a few balls, making some catches, chatting, listening, and gaining the occasional nugget into how to improve his game. Well, that’s how I felt in May 2012. I was a 53-year old with a PhD in finance from Wharton, having taught investments and portfolio management at the Ivey Business School at Western University for the past 25 years — and I was going to have dinner with my hero, the 1990 Nobel laureate in economics, Dr. Harry Markowitz, along with his wife Barbara! I was going to have dinner with the father of Modern Portfolio Theory!
The wheels had been set in motion the previous year. As I was planning for an upcoming sabbatical, I decided that it would be fascinating to write a book on the history of portfolio management. Since it would have a biographical component, the natural first chapter would focus on where portfolio theory began, with Dr. Markowitz. I was looking for a fellow collaborator and I bounced the idea off my friend Andrew Lo, a distinguished professor of finance at MIT (he was my…
