A chance conversation with a broker pointed Markowitz toward the stock market as the subject for his Ph.D. thesis (Markowitz interview). Nowadays, this might seem a natural topic for an ambitious young graduate student, but that was not the case at the start of the 1950s. For example, the elite students of the Harvard Business School shunned Wall Street: in the early 1950s, only 3 percent of them took jobs there. "The new generation considered it unglamorous. Outside its gargoyled stone fortresses, black limousines waited for men with weary memories. Inside, it was masculine, aging, and unchanged by technology."

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 200