Andrew Lo

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, a Professor of Finance, and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Prior to MIT Sloan, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School as the W.P. Carey Assistant Professor of Finance from 1984 to 1987, and as the W.P. Carey Associate Professor of Finance from 1987 to 1988. His research interests include the empirical validation and implementation of financial asset pricing models; the pricing of options and other derivative securities; financial engineering and risk management; trading technology and market microstructure; statistics, econometrics, and stochastic processes; computer algorithms and numerical methods; financial visualization; nonlinear models of stock and bond returns; hedge-fund risk and return dynamics and risk transparency; and, most recently, evolutionary and neurobiological models of individual risk preferences and financial markets.

Lo has published numerous articles in finance and economics journals. He is a coauthor of The Econometrics of Financial Markets, A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, The Heretics of Finance, and The Evolution of Technical Analysis, and is the author of Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective. Lo is currently an associate editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Portfolio Management, the Journal of Computational Finance, and Quantitative Finance, and is a coeditor of Annual Review of Financial Economics.

His awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Paul A. Samuelson Award, the American Association for Individual Investors Award, the Graham and Dodd Award, the 2001 IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the CFA Institute’s James R. Vertin Award, and awards for teaching excellence from both the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and MIT Sloan.

A former governor of the Boston Stock Exchange, he is currently a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the OFR Financial Research Advisory Committee, the New York Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, FINRA’s Economic Advisory Committee, the Consortium for Systemic Risk Analytics Academic Advisory Board, the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Board of Overseers. He is founder and chief scientific officer of AlphaSimplex Group, LLC, a quantitative investment management company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lo holds a BA in economics from Yale University as well as an AM and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Current Research Focus: Lo’s current research falls into four areas: evolutionary models of behavior and adaptive markets, systemic risk, the dynamics of the hedge funds industry, and healthcare finance. Current projects include: deriving risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, and other behaviors as the product of evolution in stochastic environments; constructing new measures of systemic risk and comparing them across time and systemic events; applying spectral analysis to investment strategies to decompose returns into fundamental frequencies; and developing new risk management tools for drug discovery and financing methods for funding biomedical innovation.