Portfolio Selection. by MARKOWITZ, Harry M - 1959: Efficent Diversification of Investments.

New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Chapman & Hall, Ltd, London,, 1959. Inscribed to an investor who developed his principles First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the title page "Dear Andrew: Best wishes, Harry Markowitz". The recipient was the American investor and financial writer Andrew Rudd, the co-author of a book based on Markowitz's principles: Modern Portfolio Theory: The Principles of Investment Management (1982). Portfolio Selection is the founding book of what is since known as Modern Portfolio Theory. The theory - widely followed in financial markets and asset holdings - emphasizes that a diversified portfolio mixing low-risk with risker investments will optimize returns with controlled risk. The book greatly expands the system first put forward in Markowitz's 1952 article of the same name. Markowitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1990 for his work in the field, alongside Merton Miller and William Sharpe who subsequently developed the theory. In their announcement of the prize, the Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that, "the first pioneering contribution in the field of financial economics was made in the 1950s by Harry Markowitz who developed a theory for households' and firms' allocation of financial assets under uncertainty, the so-called theory of portfolio choice. This theory analyzes how wealth can be optimally invested in assets which differ in regard to their expected return and risk, and thereby also how risks can be reduced... Markowitz showed that under certain given conditions, an investor's portfolio choice can be reduced to balancing two dimensions, i.e., the expected return on the portfolio and its variance... In this way, the complicated and multidimensional problem of portfolio choice with respect to a large number of different assets, each with varying properties, is reduced to a conceptually simple two-dimensional problem – known as mean-variance analysis... Generally speaking, Markowitz's work on portfolio theory may be regarded as having established financial micro analysis as a respectable research area in economic analysis" (16 October 1990 press release, accessible online). Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. Diagrams and tables throughout. Bookseller's ticket (Follet's of Chicago) to front free endpaper. Very minor sunning and rubbing at extremities, small patch of browning to front free endpaper; jacket with slight soiling, minor sunning to spine, short closed tear at head of rear panel, without price as issued: a near-fine copy in near-fine jacket.