William F. Sharpe

 is the Stanco 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is a Founder of Financial Engines, Inc., and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, 1990. Sharpe is noted for developing the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and is also the creator of the Sharpe ratio.

Studies on investing
Sharpe has rendered studies on various aspects of investing.

Sharpe's brief paper, The Arithmetic of Active Management is often cited as an elegant argument in favor of passive management. The emphasis on the importance of cost management is continued in Sharpe's 2013 paper, The Arithmetic of Investment Expenses.

Sharpe was an early advocate of portfolio style analysis.

His most recent research takes issue with the paradigm of set asset allocations, rebalanced back to policy allocations in contrarian style, by arguing for adaptive asset allocation policies that adapt as the relative market values of major asset classes change.