Eugene Fama is a Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences and is often referred to as the father of modern finance. But if it weren't for a summer job he took as an undergraduate student at Tufts University, he may never have studied finance at all.
Fama actually majored in Romance Languages, but a temporary position at a stock market newsletter piqued his interest in the financial world. The newsletter tasked its young recruit with evaluating stock prices and finding "buy and sell signals" for investors to act on. What Fama found was that price movements were extremely difficult to predict, and it sparked his curiosity about how stock prices are determined. As a result, after completing his undergraduate degree, Fama decided to shift his focus to economics. For his graduate studies he enrolled at Chicago Business School. There, under the mentorship of influential economists like Merton Miller and Harry Roberts, he developed a keen interest in the empirical analysis of financial markets.
"My generation came along at the right time," Fama explains in a new online documentary called Tune Out the Noise. "Data was starting to be generated. Nobody had touched the data. So whatever you did was new. It was like shooting fish in a barrel."
PICTURE: Eugene Fama (left) with David Food, co-founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors.
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