Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama (/ˈfɑːmə/; born February 14, 1939) is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis.

[1][2] The Research Papers in Economics project ranked him as the 9th-most influential economist of all time based on his academic contributions, as of April 2019[update].

He earned his undergraduate degree in Romance Languages magna cum laude in 1960 from Tufts University, where he was also selected as the school’s outstanding student–athlete.

That work was subsequently rewritten into a less technical article, "Random Walks In Stock Market Prices",[8] which was published in the Financial Analysts Journal in 1965 and Institutional Investor in 1968.

In 1965 he published an analysis of the behavior of stock market prices that showed that they exhibited so-called fat tail distribution properties, implying extreme movements were more common than predicted on the assumption of normality.

In recent years, Fama has become controversial again, for a series of papers, co-written with Kenneth French, that challenge the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), which posits that a stock's beta alone should explain its average return.

They also offer evidence that a variety of patterns in average returns, often labeled as "anomalies" in past work, can be explained with their Fama–French three-factor model.

[18] Fama has been skeptical about the long-term viability of bitcoin, citing its extreme volatility, lack of intrinsic value, and violation of basic monetary principles.