In the early 1950s, another doctoral student named HarryMarkowitz posited a statistical approach to investment selection called Modern Portfolio Theory.
The model quickly became a cornerstone of investing theory, and it helped earn William Sharpe and HarryMarkowitz the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1990.
The University of Chicago's Nobel laureate HarryMarkowitz developed the concept of optimal portfolio diversification in the 1950s, but long before that investors and other businesspeople had intuitively grasped the idea.