Paul Cootner
Paul Harold Cootner (May 24, 1930 – April 16, 1978) was an American financial economist best known for his book The Random Character of Stock Market Prices. He argued that stock prices move mostly at random and are hard to predict.
Born in Logansport, Indiana, Cootner earned a BA and an MA from the University of Florida and a PhD in industrial economics from MIT in 1953, supervised by Walt Whitman Rostow.
After a short period at Brown University, service in the Army, and work with Resources for the Future, he joined the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1959. There he began researching the random walk idea of stock prices, which led to his 1964 book.
In 1970 he left MIT to join Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1978 in Stanford, California, at age 47.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:47 (CET).