William F. Sharpe
American economist · United States · Academics · Born 1934 · age 92
William F. Sharpe is read about 92 times a day, in 52 languages.
Counted to 17 September 2026, not since.
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Something wrong?He gave finance a way to measure whether risk is worth taking. The Sharpe ratio - return divided by volatility - turned portfolio management from art into math, and made him a Nobel laureate in the process.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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In their own words 2
, From a more theoretical viewpoint, one can focus on the nexus between the present and the future.
The central question for positive financial economics is valuation - what is the value today of a set of future prospective cash flows?
Awards
About this person
William Forsyth Sharpe was born June 16, 1934, and built his career at the intersection of economics and investment theory. He co-originated the capital asset pricing model, which reshaped how markets think about risk and expected return. In 1990 he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for that work. Along the way he developed the Sharpe ratio for risk-adjusted performance analysis, contributed to the binomial method for option valuation, created the gradient method for asset allocation, and pioneered returns-based style analysis for evaluating fund behavior. He became the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where the tools he forged became the lingua franca of modern portfolio management.
In common with William
Finn E. KydlandBoth received Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
W. Arthur LewisBoth received Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
Robert J. ShillerBoth received Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
Joel MokyrBoth received Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
Leonid HurwiczBoth received Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
Douglass NorthBoth received Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred NobelFame.am measures public visibility signals. It does not measure human value, talent, morality, or credibility.