9. Reaping Reward By Increasing Risk
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To the great relief of assistant professors who must publish or perish, there is still much debate within the academic community on risk measurement, and much more empirical testing needs to be done. Undoubtedly, there will yet be many improvements in the techniques of risk analysis, and the quantitative analysis of risk measurement is far from dead. My own guess is that future risk measures will be even more sophisticated—not less so. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to accept beta or any other measure as an easy way to assess risk and to predict future returns with any certainty. You should know about the best of the modern techniques of the new investment technology—they can be useful aids. But there is never going to be a handsome genie who will appear and solve all our investment problems.

— Burton Malkiel

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "To the great relief of assistant professors who must publish or perish, there is still much debate within the academic community on risk measurement, and much more empirical testing needs to be done. Undoubtedly, there will yet be many improvements in the techniques of risk analysis, and the quantitative analysis of risk measurement is far from dead. My own guess is that future risk measures will be even more sophisticated—not less so. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to accept beta or any other measure as an easy way to assess risk and to predict future returns with any certainty. You should know about the best of the modern techniques of the new investment technology—they can be useful aids. But there is never going to be a handsome genie who will appear and solve all our investment problems." in the context of "9. Reaping Reward By Increasing Risk" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Burton Malkiel" (Quotes, A Random Walk Down Wall Street (2019; 12th ed.)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

About Burton Malkiel

Burton Gordon Malkiel (born August 28, 1932) is an American economist and writer, most famous for his classic finance book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.