Nobel Prize-Winning Expert on Behavioral Economics Daniel Kahneman Dies at 90

by Palash Ghosh, Pensions & Investments, March 28, 2024: Bruce Jacobs remembers Daniel Kahneman as “a cognitive psychologist who gave birth to a thriving branch of economics based on human behavior rather than on standard expected utility theory.” Jacobs, who is quoted extensively in a remembrance of Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning career, said that Kahneman “found that when forced to make complex decisions in... uncertain situations, people were not coolly calculating rational agents. Rather, they tended to rely on heuristics—mental shortcuts and rules of thumb. Kahneman found that people could be irrational in systematic ways.” Their systematic behavior “could be incorporated into a forecasting framework,” Jacobs noted, “an insight that gave birth to the field of behavioral economics.”

Bruce I. Jacobs’s Remarks in Tribute to Harry M. Markowitz at the JOIM Spring Conference

Spring JOIM Conference, The Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, March 25, 2024: Bruce Jacobs was among a group of colleagues and friends of Harry Markowitz who paid tribute to the late Nobel laureate at the JOIM spring conference in San Diego. Bruce delivered two sets of remarks... In his first talk, “Collaborating with Harry Markowitz: A Remembrance,” Bruce recounted how early correspondences about his work debunking portfolio insurance led to Harry agreeing to write a foreword to Bruce’s book, Capital Ideas and Market Realities: Option Replication, Investor Behavior, and Stock Market Crashes. Harry would subsequently also provide forewords to Bruce and Ken Levy’s books, Equity Management: Quantitative Analysis for Stock Selection and Equity Management: The Art and Science of Modern Quantitative Investing. Bruce, Ken, and Harry collaborated in creating a financial market simulator, JLMSim, and engaged in a spirited debate about Bruce and Ken’s mean-variance-leverage model, an extension of Harry’s mean-variance model. In a second talk given during the conference’s afternoon session, titled “Harry Markowitz Celebration of Life,” Bruce offered some personal recollections about Harry, noting that he was “a master at thinking about how to think about problems.”

Factor Investing Paper Wins Top Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award

by Rob Kozlowski, Pensions & Investments, March 1, 2024: The Best Article for the 25th Annual Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Awards was awarded to “Fact, Fiction, and Factor Investing” by Michele Aghassi, Cliff Asness, Charles Fattouche, and Tobias J. Moskowitz. The authors evaluate a variety of claims about factor... investing, confirming some and rebutting others. The article finds that factors receiving the most attention in academia are those based on solid theory and strong in-sample statistical significance. Bruce Jacobs, principal and co-founder of Jacobs Levy Equity Management, said “the authors are to be commended for sifting through the many claims about factor investing and presenting an assessment of its benefits and drawbacks.” All articles that appeared in the Journal of Portfolio Management from 2023 were eligible for the award and were voted on by subscribers.