Barry Ritholtz, Columnist

Burton Malkiel's Random Walk

An early proponent of the idea that almost no one consistently beats markets.

May 31, 2016 at 3:28 PM UTC

Barry Ritholtz is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

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This week on our Masters in Business podcast, we speak with Burton Malkiel, economics professor at Princeton University and author of the best-selling "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," now in its 11th edition.

Malkiel, who was a director for the Vanguard Group for 28 years and now is chief investment officer for robo-adviser Wealthfront, touched on everything from how he urged the creation of index funds to why “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages" would match the investment performance of the best professional stock pickers. This is because markets are now filled with smart, hard-working and insightful managers with a vast wealth of technology at their fingertip. Alpha, or market-beating returns, are almost immediately competed away.