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.. the machine-gun clatter of fingers on a keyboard.

Americans have always welcomed change. Revolution is our birthright. We take it as a sign of our youth that we prefer the new to the old. We are fascinated by innovation and lionize the innovators. We are partial to tinkerers and make folk-heroes out of people like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Benjamin Franklin.

But sometimes change seems to run amuck and things appear to be out of control. Then fear takes over and spoils our appetite for novelty. That is what has happened in Wall Street over the past fifteen or twenty years.

The complexity and speed of financial innovation have reached a point where it is hard to grasp what is happening from moment to moment. Amateur investors and many professionals are wary of space-age trading strategies and kinky financial instruments that seem beyond their understanding. Individual investors grumble that they are the last to receive information about the stocks they own and the last to find buyers when security prices are dropping. Giant financial institutions complain that security prices are dangerously volatile. There is a widely held perception that overpaid MBAs, corporate raiders, and investment managers who talk like astrophysicists are living in a world of their own, detached from the realities of people who really work for a living.

But that is only part of the story. The untold part, which is what this book is about, reveals that much of this fear and resentment is misplaced. Baffling as it may be to some, Wall Street is vital and productive, a model for the rest of the world, including former socialist countries seeking the path to prosperity and freedom.

The gap in understanding between insiders and outsiders in Wall Street has developed because today’s financial markets are the result of a recent but obscure revolution that took root in the groves of ivy rather than in the canyons of lower Manhattan. Its heroes were a tiny contingent of scholars, most at the very beginning of their careers, who had no direct interest in the stock market and whose analysis of the economics of finance began at high levels of abstraction.

Yet the message they brought to Wall Street was simplicity itself, based on two of the most basic laws of economics. There can be no reward without risk. And gaining an advantage over skilled and knowledgeable competitors in a free market is extraordinarily difficult. By combining the linkage between risk and reward with the combative nature of the free market, these academics brought new insights into what Wall Street is all about and devised new methods for investors to manage their capital.

Much of what these scholars had to say often seemed strange and uninviting to hungry investors and to the aggressive salesmen who inhabit Wall Street. But in their quiet way the academics eventually overcame the old guard and liberated the city of capital. Before they were done, they had transformed today’s wealth of nations and the lives of all of us, as citizens, savers, and breadwinners.

Today investors are more keenly aware of risk, and better able to deal with it, than at any time in the past. They have a more sophisticated understanding of how financial markets behave and are capable of using to advantage the vast array of new vehicles and new trading strategies specifically tailored to their needs. Innovative techniques of corporate finance have led to more careful evaluation of corporate wealth and more effective allocation of capital. The financial restructuring of the 1980s created novel solutions to the problems arising from the separation of ownership and control and made corporate managers more responsive to the interests of shareholders.

•••

The first signs of the revolution in finance and investing appeared in October 1974, with the culmination of the worst bear market in common stocks since the Great Crash of 1929. By the time prices finally touched bottom, market values had fallen more than 40 percent from what they had been two years earlier.

That was not all. An overheated domestic economy and the rapacity of the OPEC countries had sent inflation soaring. In just a year and a half, the cost of living jumped 20 percent, more than 1 percent a month. After adjustment for inflation, the entire rise in stock prices since 1954 had been erased. At the same time, the bond market, the traditional haven for the risk-averse, suffered a 35 percent loss of purchasing power.

No one emerged unscathed. Employees found that the decline in the value of their pension funds threatened the security of their retirement. Distress brought pressure for change throughout the world of finance: the way professionals managed their clients’ capital, the structure of the financial system itself, the functioning of the markets, the range of investment choices available to savers, and the role of finance in the profitability and competitiveness of American companies. Many of the star portfolio managers of the go-go years of the 1960s disappeared in the rubble, along with Richard Nixon’s price controls and Gerald Ford’s W.I.N, buttons. Respected banks, major industrial corporations, and even the City of New York stood at the brink of bankruptcy.

Had it not been for the crisis of 1974, few financial practitioners would have paid attention to the ideas that had been stirring in the ivory towers for some twenty years. But when it turned out that improvised strategies to beat the market served only to jeopardize their clients’ interests, practitioners realized that they had to change their ways. Reluctantly, they began to show interest in converting the abstract ideas of the academics into methods to control risk and to staunch the losses their clients were suffering. This was the motivating force of the revolution that shaped the new Wall Street.

•••

Even an incomplete list of the innovations that have emerged since the mid-1970s reminds us of how profoundly the present differs from the past. The unfamiliarity of some of the new terminology suggests the magnitude of that break with tradition.

Today there are money market funds, bank CDs for small savers, unregulated brokerage commissions, and discount brokers. There are hundreds of mutual funds specializing in big stocks, small stocks, emerging growth stocks, Treasury bonds, junk bonds, index funds, government-guaranteed mortgages, and international stocks and bonds from all around the world. There is ERISA to regulate corporate pension funds, and there are employee savings plans that enable employees to manage their own pension funds. There are markets for options (puts and calls) and markets for futures, and markets for options on futures. There is program trading, index arbitrage, and risk arbitrage. There are managers who provide portfolio insurance and managers who offer something called tactical asset allocation. There are butterfly swaps and synthetic equity. Corporations finance themselves with convertible bonds, zero-coupon bonds, bonds that pay interest by promising to pay more interest later on, and bonds that give their owners the unconditional right to receive their money back before the bonds come due.

The world’s total capital market of stocks, bonds, and cash had ballooned from only $2 trillion in 1969 to more than $22 trillion by the end of 1990; the market for stocks alone had soared from $300 billion to $55 trillion. Today, more than half of the global market, nearly $12 trillion, trades outside the United States, compared to only one-third of the market in 1969. Hence, the wealth of nations.

Over $2 trillion, more than 50 percent of the common stock outstanding in the United States, is now owned by pension funds, mutual funds, educational endowments, and charitable foundations, compared with 40 percent in 1980 and less than 15 percent in 1950. These institutions account for 80 percent of all trading activity in the stock market, and none of them pays income taxes or taxes on capital gains. More than 70 percent of all outstanding shares changes hands in the course of a year, up from only 20 percent or so in the 1970s. The average transaction of the New York Stock Exchange now exceeds 2,000 shares, nearly six times what it was in 1974; half of the daily volume of trading takes place in blocks of 10,000 shares or more. Meanwhile, individual investors who buy and sell for their own accounts are a disappearing breed. Their direct holdings of common stocks now represent only 16 percent of their financial assets, down from 44 percent in the late 1960s.1 Odd-lots (transactions of less than 100 shares) have fallen from 5 percent of total volume to less than 2 percent.

Financial assets now change hands with dizzying speed. Daily trading on the New York Stock Exchange averages over 150 million shares, more than ten times the daily average of 1974, five times the average in the highest year of the 1970s, and 100 times the average in the early 1950s. On Black Monday of October 1987, 604 million shares were traded. Millions of additional shares are traded directly across computers, bypassing the organized exchanges altogether. The volume of shares traded in the markets for futures and options often exceeds the volume traded on the organized exchanges. Trading in Tokyo is ten times what it was in 1982, in Frankfurt twelve times, and in London thirty times.

The pace is even swifter in the once-sedate bond market. Daily trading in U.S. government bonds runs about $100 billion. That means that the ownership of the entire national debt is turning over ten times a year. Trading is swifter still in the foreign-exchange markets: Transactions in the United States exceed $100 billion a day, while Tokyo does some $30 billion and other world markets do another $100 billion.

Such volume would be impossible without the computer. Many complex securities could not even be priced without the computer’s speed and mathematical capabilities. So-called DOT transactions automate small trades on the New York Stock Exchange and transmit them instantaneously from the customer’s broker to the post where the order is executed. The whole world, it seems, is becoming computerized. Even Latin America and Spain rely on computers to carry out trades, check customer credits, and post the transaction results for records and statements.2 In an article titled “The Wild, Wired World of Electronic Exchanges,” Institutional Investor magazine for September 1989 paints the scene: “Say good-bye to the heady roar of the exchange floor. Forget the terse shouting of two traders on the phone. The new sound of finance is the machine-gun clatter of fingers on a keyboard. And it can already be heard on thousands of trading desks in dozens of markets around the world.”3

Financial markets are among the most dazzling creations of the modern world. Popular histories of financial markets from the City of London to Wall Street tell the story of panics, robber barons, crooks, and rags-to-riches tycoons. But such colorful tales give little hint of the seriousness of the business that goes on in those markets. John Maynard Keynes once remarked that the stock market is little more than a beauty contest and a curse to capitalism. And yet no nation that has abandoned socialism for capitalism considers the job complete until it has a functioning financial market.

Simply put, Wall Street shapes Main Street. It transforms factories, department stores, banking assets, film producers, machinery, soft-drink bottlers, and power lines into something that can be easily convertible into money and into vehicles for diversifying risks. It converts such entities into assets that you can trade with anonymous buyers or sellers. It makes hard assets liquid, and it puts a price on those assets that promises that they will be put to their most productive uses.

Wall Street also changes the character of the assets themselves. It has never been a place where people merely exchange money for stocks, bonds, and mortgages. Wall Street is a focal point where individuals, businesses, and even entire economies anticipate the future. The daily movements of security prices reveal how confident people are in their expectations, what time horizons they envisage, and what hopes and fears they are communicating to one another.

The ancients left prediction to the Sphinx, to the Delphic oracle, or to those who could read the entrails of animals. Ecclesi-astes tells us that “there is no remembrance of things past, neither shall there be remembrance of things to come.” Dante reserved a seat in hell for anyone “whose glance too far before him ranged,” and twisted their heads back-to-front.4

Today anticipating the future is a necessity, not an arcane game. Yet how do we make decisions when our crystal ball turns cloudy? How much risk can we afford to take? How can we tell how big the risk actually is? How long can we afford to wait to discover whether our bets are going to pay off?

The innovations triggered by the revolution in finance and investing provide answers to such questions. They help investors deal with uncertainty. They provide benchmarks for determining whether expectations are realistic or fanciful and whether risks make sense or are foolish. They establish norms for determining how well a market is accommodating the needs of its participants. They have reformulated such familiar concepts as risk, return, diversification, insurance, and debt. Moreover, they have quantified those concepts and have suggested new ways of employing them and combining them for optimal results. Finally, they have added a measure of science to the art of corporate finance.

Many of these innovations lay hidden in academic journals for years, unnoticed by Wall Street until the financial turbulence of the early 1970s forced practitioners to accept the harsh truth that investment is a risky business. This was the key insight that the academics brought to Wall Street. Waiting for one’s ship to come in is inevitably uncomfortable and uncertain, they declared, but there is no way to avoid the discomfort or to foretell just what the future holds in store.

Wall Street responded to this urgent message by expanding the variety of mutual funds, by showing heightened interest in international investing, and by devising new instruments of corporate finance. Moreover, it discovered new sources of return in such risk-controlling techniques as options, futures, swaps, portfolio insurance, and other exotic measures.

Some of these innovations produced unforeseen and undesirable outcomes. Financial markets, like many other creations of the human imagination, mix dangerous tendencies with wholesome impulses.

Most economic crises, in one way or another, have originated from abuses in the financial system, which may explain why orthodox economists have traditionally shunned their brethren in the finance departments. Stocks and bonds, for example, by their very nature, invite speculation and even corruption. No one buys them with the lofty purpose of making the allocation of the nation’s capital more efficient. People buy them only in the hope of catching a ride on the road to riches.

Because stocks and bonds are liquid, decisions to buy or sell them can be easily reversed. They change hands anonymously as their prices march across the computer screen. Because they move in response to information of all types, the player who gets the information first has an enormous advantage.

They fluctuate in sympathy with one another, so that trouble in one place often spreads across the markets: chaos theory reminds us that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Mexico can turn out to be the cause of a tidal wave in Hawaii. Most important, the prices of stocks and bonds reflect people’s hopes and fears about the future, which means they can easily wander away from the realities of the present.

There is no way to purge financial markets of these attributes. Efforts to do so – and regulation has come in many different forms – impair the efficiency with which financial assets perform the broad social function of serving as a store of value. Liquidity, low transaction costs, and the freedom of investors to act on information are essential to that function.

•••

If individual investors had dominated the financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, the revolution we have been describing would in all likelihood never have taken place; the ingenious journal articles would have stimulated more ingenious journal articles, but little change would have occurred on Wall Street. In any case, tax constraints and high transaction costs would have prevented individual investors from transforming their portfolios to accord with the new theories. Most individual investors work at the job only part-time and cannot undertake the long study and constant attention required by the application of innovative techniques.

Instead, the revolution was augmented by the rise of institutional investors such as pension funds, which were able to change as their size and investment goals changed. In the 1950s, financial institutions were far from performance-oriented. When I first came into the investment management business in 1951, buy-and-hold was the rule and turnover in institutional portfolios was slow. One reason for this complacency was rationalized laziness in an environment in which competition played a negligible role. But in another sense it was perfectly logical. In the 1950s most stocks were owned by taxable individuals who had bought them during the 1930s and 1940s at far lower prices. I remember how impressed I was by the profits in the portfolios managed by my father’s investment counseling firm when I arrived on the scene in 1951. It made no sense to sell good companies and give Uncle Sam a disproportionate share of the winnings.

It was about this time that everything began to change. The early 1950s were a period of great prosperity across all income groups. Yearly savings by individuals nearly tripled between 1949 and 1957. As the depression-haunted generation faded away, common stocks once again became an acceptable asset, even for trust accounts; New York State led the way by discarding a longstanding statute that had limited stock ownership to 35 percent of the total of personal trust capital.

A great wave of new investors, with no share in the huge capital gains generated by the older portfolios, now acquired the habit of calling their brokers. Share-ownership doubled during the decade. By 1959, one in every eight adults owned stock, 75 percent of them with household incomes under $10,000 (the equivalent of about $40,000 in 1990 purchasing power). Individual savings flowed into the mutual funds even more rapidly than into the direct purchase of common stocks; mutual fund assets doubled between 1955 and 1960 and then doubled again over the next five years.

Corporate pension funds developed from a novelty to an institution and became the primary clients of the investment management profession. Their assets increased more than tenfold during the 1950s, giving them a powerful influence on portfolio turnover. Because pension funds are not subject to the capital gains taxes that hobble profit-taking by individuals, professional portfolio managers now began to have more fun.

This flood of new money, especially tax-free money, pouring into the marketplace soon transformed the traditional practices of comfortably ensconced trust officers and investment advisors. Competition goaded institutions into ever-higher levels of activity in their endless pursuit of rich returns. In 1967, my own organization, seeking a quick move into the big time, assented to being acquired by an aggressive young brokerage firm with a capital of only $1,000,000 that would keep on acquiring until one day it metamorphosed into one of the largest firms on Wall Street. Along with everyone else, we noticed that we were trading much more actively than in the old days, especially as more and more of the money we managed was exempt from taxation.

The process has been a constant joy to the investment advisory profession. Just during the 1980s the number of investment advisors registered with the S.E.C. tripled, while the number of mutual funds more than quadrupled. Dave Williams, chairman of one of the largest mutual fund organizations, recently quipped that “investment management is the only professional enterprise in America with more competitors than clients.”5

There are giants among them. Nearly 100 portfolio management organizations now have over $10 billion each under management. The ten largest manage $800 billion of financial assets out of an institutional total of some $5 trillion in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Citibank, which was number one in 1977 with $26 billion, would barely have made the top 25 in 1989.

The tried-and-true methods of managing portfolios that my older partners taught me in the 1950s were ill suited to the management of the vast sums that accrued to institutions as the years went by. Everything had to be revised: investment objectives, diversification patterns, trading strategies, client contracts, definitions of risk, and standards of performance.

The merry game of just picking the best stocks and tucking them into a client’s portfolio had worked well enough when portfolio management organizations were small. My firm, with less than $100 million under management when we were acquired, had no trouble running portfolios with less than twenty positions.

As organizations grew in size, that scale of operations was no longer practical. Managers with $5 billion under management and with only twenty holdings in a portfolio have to put $250 million into each position. To accumulate such large holdings and to liquidate them later on tends to move stock prices so far that the sheer cost of transacting cuts deeply into the portfolio’s rate of return. Many of the go-go managers of the 1960s ignored that reality, and continued to act as though they were still managing small portfolios. Their innocent disregard of change helps explain what happened when stormy economic weather overwhelmed the optimistic markets of 1971 and 1972.

•••

Before the revolution, the clients of our family-oriented business would come to us and say, “Here is my capital. Take care of me.” As long as their losses were limited when the market fell, and as long as their portfolios rose as the market was rising, they had few complaints. They came to us and stayed with us because we understood their problems and the myriad kinds of contingent liabilities that all individuals must face. They recognized that we shared the delicate texture of their views about risk. We joked that we were nothing more than social workers to the rich–but skilled social workers to the rich, confident that our performance was being measured in human satisfaction rather than in comparative rates of return. We knew no more about the clients of other investment managers than they knew about ours.

But when corporate pension funds and university endowments replace individuals as the dominant clientele, the manager/client relationship undergoes a transformation. Social work goes out of fashion: personal relationships, though still important, grow more tenuous. Usually the person with whom the advisor deals must report to some higher authority who has no direct relationship with the advisor. The shareholders in mutual funds seldom know the names of the people who manage their money. Anyone who is interested can find out how much the General Motors Pension fund has to invest, whether Yale is dissatisfied with the way XYZ Associates has been managing their endowment fund, or how well ABC Management performed last year.

As financial markets multiplied and as institutions and professional managers became the principal players, innovation was inevitable. But innovation must be preceded by theory. And the role of theory in the financial revolution took some surprising twists and turns.

•••

The intellectual roots of most revolutions reach back to men and women who are also deeply involved in motivating what happens. Not so the makers of the revolution in finance. None of the pioneering work in either theory or practice was done in New York, the greatest financial market in the world. Most of the pioneers were professors with a taste for higher mathematics, strange bedfellows for the hard-nosed veterans of boom and bust. Few of them ever played the market with more than a few thousand dollars of their own. Nor did they shout their theories from the rooftops. With only a couple of exceptions, they were content to publish their ideas in academic journals and to debate them with their colleagues.

When their articles began to appear in the journals, adorned with fancy equations made up of Greek symbols, the few investors who were aware of them considered their ideas a joke dreamed up by a bunch of egg-heads who had never owned, much less managed, a portfolio. One distinguished practitioner, in an interview in 1977, dismissed their theorizing as “a lot of baloney.”6 Another referred to them as “academia nuts.”7

When three of them were chosen to share the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in October 1990, few outsiders had the slightest idea of who they were, what they had done, or why they deserved the most coveted prize in economics, a discipline that itself was slow to claim them as its own. One of the laureates remarked that their receiving the Nobel Prize was “sort of like the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.”8

For most of the scholars who pioneered the revolution, coincidence rather than any ideological passion determined the course of their work. One was a college varsity football star who had originally planned to teach French. Another was an astronomer. One dismissed his early fascination with finance as “a terrible mistake.”9 Others had settled on mathematics, engineering, and physics as their chosen fields. Such partiality may explain why most of them viewed the stock market as nothing more than a rich source of data and fascinating intellectual puzzles.

Another major player in the revolution was the computer itself. None of the theories we shall be describing here could have had any practical applications, or could even have been tested for its real-world relevance, had this revolutionary device not been available. Its extraordinary capabilities opened the way to theoretical frontiers that might otherwise have remained hidden. By transforming the sheer mechanics of financial transactions, the computer shaped their outcomes as well.

As theories about how capital markets function and how investors should manage their affairs are latecomers in the history of ideas, all but three of the principals in this story are still alive, and only four of them are over sixty years old. I sat with each of them for hours at a time, asking where their ideas had come from, how they developed and applied them, and what they had experienced during their unpredictable journey.

They told me that to conceive and develop a new theory is a high adventure. Though many of them were somewhat shy, none was faint-hearted. Moments of silent contemplation alternated with spirited disagreements with the views of colleagues and other theorists. If the answers they were seeking had been obvious, they explained, someone else would already have uncovered them. Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once described the path of discovery this way:

I think that’s the nature of discoveries, many times: that the reason they’re difficult is that you’ve got to take a series of steps, three or four steps, which if you don’t make them you won’t get there, and if you go wrong in any one of them you won’t get there. It isn’t a matter of one jump–that would be easy. You’ve got to make several successive jumps. And usually the pennies drop one after another until eventually it all clicks. Otherwise it would be too easy!10

Like all innovators who challenge accepted beliefs, the scholars who triggered the revolution in finance and investment were seldom welcomed with open arms. Some critics accused them of being incomprehensible; others complained that they had discovered nothing new. Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and historian of science, has complained that “we modern scholars often treat our professions as fortresses and our spokes-people as archers on the parapets, searching the landscape for any incursion from an alien field.”11

Like most adventurers, these scholars ended up someplace different from where they had expected to land. They had begun their exploration of the stock market as a way to solve some interesting hypothetical problems. Once having started down this path, they could not stop. In the end they succumbed to the fascination of the stock market and it conquered them. Most of the men in this book, prolific as theoreticians in finance, have at one time or another been associated with a Wall Street firm or a major investment organization.

I will also be telling the stories of six innovators who put the new theories into practice. Here we see the revolution in action. These adventurers, in search of financial reward, shared many of the experiences of the theoreticians. Self-doubt, reluctant colleagues, career risks, and uncertainty accompanied them all the way.

This book reflects my own adventures as an active participant in financial markets for over forty years. At first I found the new theories emerging from the universities during the 1950s and 1960s alien and unappealing, as did most other practitioners. What the scholars were saying seemed abstract and difficult to understand. And beyond that, it seemed both to demean my profession as I was practicing it and to prescribe radical changes in the way I should carry out my responsibilities.

Even if I could have convinced myself to turn my back on the theoretical structure that the academics were erecting, there was too much of it coming from major universities for me to accept the view of my colleagues that it was “a lot of baloney.” Finally the market disaster of 1974 convinced me that there had to be a better way to manage investment portfolios.

It was in that year that I founded The Journal of Portfolio Management to help others to learn what the new theories were all about. My goal was to build a bridge between gown and town: to foster a dialogue between the academics and the practitioners in language they could both understand, and thereby to enrich the contributions of both.

The first issue of the Journal appeared within weeks after the collapse of the great bear market of 1973–74, which probably explains the Journals immediate acceptance. The time was right for opening minds that had been closed to unfamiliar ideas. The lead article alerted the investment management profession to the consequences of the appalling loss of wealth that had just taken place. The author, James Vertin, was chief investment officer for the trust accounts at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco and one of the earliest advocates of the use of the new theories. He warned: “Current and prospective customers are increasingly suspicious, hesitant, and downright skeptical that professional investment management can consistently provide benefits that justify its cost… The dissatisfaction is pervasive… [They] are afraid of us, and what our methods might produce in the way of further loss.”12 And yet, he pointed out, “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

This book celebrates the innovators and tinkerers who showed us how it ought to be, as well as the pioneers who brought about the improbable wedding between academia and Wall Street.