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Eugene FAMA finally receives the Nobel prize he deserves

Eugene F. Fama
Photo: B. Rooney, © University of Chicago
Booth School of Business.

This Monday October 14th, more than 50 years after the race to the Moon he contributed to launch in financial economics, in the same vein than Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller, Eugene FAMA was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (well, the Swedish National Bank prize for the meticulous ones). 

You can read the press release here (Nobel Prize press release) or the excellent full report produced at this occasion.

Fama is known for his numerous articles on testing the Efficient Markets Hypothesis he proposed, many of them written with his fidele co-author Kenneth French.

But what people must realise is that he gave an impulse to a whole generation at University of Chicago, to which Modern Finance owes a lot. A generation that counted among them: Schaefer, Schleifer, Scholes,...and André Farber (ULB). Fama and Farber wrote in 1979: Money, Bonds and Foreign Exchange. 

The Europeans of that generation came back from US and gave rise to a substantial update in the way Finance was taught in business schools over this side of the Atlantic.

We suggest you to read his story narrated by himself.

Dear Prof. Fama, congratulations for your work and thank you for the momentum (not in the markets but in research this time) you created.

Hugues Pirotte

HFT, flash crashes, true liquidity and time redefinition

 

One of my thesis students, motivated by the quantitative analysis of market data, fell on the subject of the so-called "flash market crash" of May 6 2010 and the related subject of high-frequency trading (HFT). The Dow Jones losing USD 1 trillion in a matter of minutes to then recover quite quickly most of the value lost? That's exciting! Well, at least it is intriguing...