Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, and co-originator of the Black–Scholes options pricing model.

After his mother died from cancer, Scholes remained in Hamilton for undergraduate studies and earned a Bachelor's degree in economics from McMaster University in 1962.

One of his professors at McMaster introduced him to the works of George Stigler and Milton Friedman, two University of Chicago economists who would later both win Nobel prizes in economics.

Here, Scholes was a colleague with Michael Jensen and Richard Roll, and he had the opportunity to study with Eugene Fama and Merton Miller, researchers who were developing the relatively new field of financial economics.

While at Chicago, Scholes also started working closely with the Center for Research in Security Prices, helping to develop and analyze its famous database of high frequency stock market data.

In 1994 Scholes joined several colleagues, including John Meriwether, the former vice-chairman and head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers, and his future Nobel Memorial Prize co-winner Robert C. Merton, and co-founded a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM).

[5] Subsequent to LTCM, in 1999 Scholes joined Oak Hill Capital, the private equity firm led by Robert Bass.

In this role, he leads the firm's evolving asset allocation product development efforts and partners with the investment team contributing macro insights and quantitative analysis specific to hedging, risk management and disciplined portfolio construction.