Burton Malkiel

Burton Gordon Malkiel (born August 28, 1932) is an American economist, financial executive, and writer most noted for his classic finance book A Random Walk Down Wall Street (first published 1973, in its 13th edition as of 2023).

Malkiel is the Chemical Bank chairman's professor of economics at Princeton University, and is a two-time chairman of the economics department there. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers (1975–1977), president of the American Finance Association (1978), and dean of the Yale School of Management (1981–1988). He also spent 28 years as a director of the Vanguard Group. He is Chief Investment Officer of software-based financial advisor, Wealthfront Inc.^[1] and as a member of the Investment Advisory Board for Rebalance.^[2] Malkiel was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2001.^[3]

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.^[4] 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. In a 2020 interview, Malkiel also stated he was not opposed in principle to investing or trading in single stocks (as exemplified by the popularity of Robinhood), provided the large majority of one's portfolio is index funds.^[5]