The great crash of 2008 brought the question of stability of the financial markets to the forefront. Are financial markets stable? Was the great crash of 2008 an unexpected aberration? How should individual investors invest over a lifetime? Why are otherwise smart people such lousy investors? What does Modern Portfolio Theory tell us about investing and where does it fail? Does Behavioral finance capture Investor mistakes correctly? The speaker will attempt to answer these questions from a Physicist’s viewpoint. This leads to a new framework for investing that extends modern portfolio theory to incorporate large deviations – such as bubble and crashes. The Colloquium will not assume prior knowledge of the subject matter and will be aimed at an audience of a variety of backgrounds.

Ashvin B. Chhabra is President of Euclidean Capital and manages the Endowment for the Simons Foundation. He was Chief Investment Officer of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, one of the largest wealth management firms in the world, from 2013-2015 and Chief Investment Officer for the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton prior to that. He is the author of the recently published book The Aspirational Investor. Dr. Chhabra received his M.S. in Physics from the University of Georgia and Ph.D. from Yale University in Applied Physics.