"I should mention that I am a member of the board of directors of Dimensional Fund Advisors."
About Merton Miller
Merton Miller — Life and Legacy
Merton Miller was a prominent economist whose work fundamentally reshaped the landscape of financial theory. He is best known for the Modigliani-Miller theorem, which posits that under certain market conditions, a firm's value is unaffected by its capital structure. This groundbreaking idea challenged traditional notions and established a new framework for understanding corporate finance. Miller's insights into risk and capital markets are encapsulated in his assertion that 'the cost of capital' is vital for investment decisions. This highlights his belief that understanding risk is essential for effective financial management. His work not only influenced academic thought but also had practical implications for how businesses approach financing and investment strategies. Today, Miller's theories remain relevant as they provide a foundation for modern financial practices and continue to inform discussions about market efficiency and corporate governance. His ability to challenge existing paradigms and articulate complex ideas in a clear manner has left a lasting impact on both scholars and practitioners in the field of finance.
Quote collection
Merton Miller quotes
17 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet."
"As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a company that was advising customers about portfolio decisions, writing reports."
"What counts is what you do with your money, not where it came from."
"You only need to make one big score in finance to be a hero forever."
"I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any."
"I favour passive investing for most investors, because markets are amazingly successful devices for incorporating information into stock prices."
"Junk bonds prove there's nothing magical in a Aaa bond rating."
"If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful... but they're really not."
"Diversification is your buddy."
"Everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it and get it incorporated into prices."
"Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn't affect the size of the pizza. And similarly, the stocks, bonds, warrants, etc., issued don't affect the aggregate value of the firm."
"My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury."
"But in practice, if often comes down to not suffering a loss as big as the huge gain you made a while ago."
"... Any pension fund manager who doesn't have the vast majority-and I mean 70% or 80% of his or her portfolio-in passive investments is guilty of malfeasance, nonfeasance or some other kind of bad feasance!"
"Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't."
"Arbitrage proof has since been widely used throughout finance and economics."