John Lintner

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John Virgil Lintner, Jr. (February 9, 1916 – June 8, 1983) was a professor at the Harvard Business School in the 1960s and one of the co-creators of the capital asset pricing model.

For a time, much confusion was created because the various economists working on this model independently failed to realize that they were saying much the same thing. They looked at the issue of capital asset valuation from different perspectives. William F. Sharpe, for example, approached the problem as an individual investor picking stocks. Lintner, on the other hand, approached it from the perspective of a corporation issuing shares of stock.

Lintner was also known for a 1983 presentation he gave to the Financial Analysts Federation. For the first time he presented what has become known as the "Lintner Paper," formally titled "The Potential Role of Managed Commodity-Financial Futures Accounts (and/or Funds) in Portfolios of Stocks and Bonds."^[1] Lintner's research combined a volatile asset, managed futures CTAs, with another volatile asset, stocks, to reduce overall portfolio volatility and improve returns. For NonCorrelated investors Lintner's work was a foundational milestone that has been used to advance this investment discipline.

Lintner earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas in 1939. He arrived at Harvard for graduate study the next year. He quickly impressed the faculty, and in 1942 became a member of the Society of Fellows, a three-year paid fellowship with no duties except self-directed research.