Henry Markovitz

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Harry Markovitz wrote two classic articles on finance, "Portfolio Selection," Journal of Finance (March 1952) and "The Utility of Wealth," Journal of Political Economy (April 1952), when he was a 25 year old graduate student at the University of Chicago.

He received the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics for the article on portfolio selection. That work began with the premise that investors have two goals, they seek to maximize return and they want to reduce the variance of return (where variance can be understood as a proxy for risk.)

A rational investor will accomplish this, Markovitz concluded, with a diversified portfolio that combines a group of risky securities with some relatively low-risk assets.