Five to Honor: Investing Pioneers—The 2015 IA 35 for 35

While advisors are intellectually curious about all manners of topics, it’s investing that really gets them going. When it comes to investing theory and application, these five men being honored as part of the 2015 IA 35 tend to be in every advisor’s pantheon.

Interestingly, these are also men who have strong personal connections with each other—either as student and teacher, mentor and mentee or business advisor and entrepreneur. Not that they always agree, but even in their criticism and, in some cases, their aversion to suffering fools gladly, they’re more interested in getting to the truth than they are in scoring debating points.

Let’s start with Graham, the father of value investing, yes, but more important, the person who democratized investing, explaining the ways of Wall Street but also paving the way, eventually, for advisors and clients to avoid the ways of Wall Street. Graham’s influence came through his collaboration with David Dodd in research, teaching at Columbia University and publishing seminal books. Perhaps his most famous student, Warren Buffett, called “The Intelligent Investor” (1949) “by far the best book on investing ever written.”

In his foreword to Rob Arnott’s book “The Fundamental Index,” Harry Markowitz sums up fundamental indexing this way: “What I will refer to as an efficiency-weighted portfolio will outperform a capitalization-weighted portfolio.” In a footnote in the book, Arnott writes that “many of the critics of the Fundamental Index concept are our friends and even mentors,” noting that Jack Bogle himself encouraged Arnott to launch his firm Research Affiliates. In turn, Arnott “views Bogle as one of his heroes […] and sees the Fundamental Index concept as a natural and important extension of Bogle’s impressive legacy.”