Journal Interview- Jack Treynor

Description

Jack Treynor is a general partner, trustee or director of several investment companies, a director of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance, and a member of the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal.  His entree to performance measurement was characterstic of Jack-brilliant and unorthodox.  A colleague at Arthur D. Little, Inc. (ADL) sent an early draft of Jack’s Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) paper to Merton Miller, who in turn sent it to Franco Modigliani, who, now famous for his financial models, had just joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Modigliani invited Jack to lunch to discuss his paper.  What followed for Jack was a one-year MIT course in econometrics.  Upon his return to ADL, his boss, Martin Everest, asked Jack what practicial value his work had.  “I gave him a list of possible applications and he ran his finger down the page, stopping at performance measurement,” says Jack.  Obviously impressed, his boss gave him his first account, the treasurer of a unversity with a large endowment.

Journal Interview – Jack Treynor