Burton Malkiel.
by Burton Malkiel — A Random Walk Down Wall Street · passive investing advocacy · Efficient Market Hypothesis
Professor of Economics at Princeton University and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Malkiel's work is the canonical academic argument for passive investing, demonstrating that most active managers fail to beat a simple index fund over time.
About Burton Malkiel
Burton Malkiel is the Chemical Bank Chairman's Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1988. He is best known for A Random Walk Down Wall Street, first published in 1973 and now in its 13th edition — one of the most enduring and widely read investing books ever written.
The book's central argument — that stock prices follow a random walk and that historical price patterns cannot reliably predict future movements — is a lay-accessible treatment of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Malkiel argues that the near-impossibility of systematically beating the market after fees makes low-cost index funds the rational choice for most investors.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street is notable for its intellectual rigor and its durability: each new edition has addressed new market conditions, instruments, and challenges to the efficient markets thesis, while maintaining the core passive-investing recommendation across more than five decades of market changes.
Malkiel has also written The Random Walk Guide to Investing (2003), a shorter companion aimed at beginners, and has co-authored work on behavioral finance. He served on the board of the Vanguard Group and has been an advisor to Wealthfront, the robo-advisor firm, reflecting his alignment with systematic, low-cost investment approaches.
Academically, Malkiel served as dean of the Yale School of Management from 1981 to 1988 and has been a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.