William Bernstein

Website: efficientfrontier.com

Books: "The Intelligent Asset Allocator," "The Four Pillars of Investing," "The Investor’s Manifesto," "The Birth of Plenty," "A Splendid Exchange," "Masters of the Word"

Biography:

Bill Bernstein is a recovering neurologist who has of late helped co-found Efficient Frontier Advisors and has written several titles on finance and economic history. Although his early formative training in economics was confined to brief stints in the US Postal Service during college Christmas breaks, his three finance books, "The Intelligent Asset Allocator" (McGraw-Hill, 2000), "The Four Pillars of Investing" (McGraw-Hill, 2010) and "The Investor’s Manifesto" (Wiley, 2012), as well as the content on his website, have made him uncomfortably popular with the press.

Bernstein is also a big believer in the value of the creative nonfiction process in helping to organize his leisure time reading. During the past six years, he has written two volumes of economic history, "The Birth of Plenty" (McGraw-Hill, 2004) and "A Splendid Exchange" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), the former about the economic growth inflection of the early nineteenth century, and the latter a wide-angle look at the history of world trade. A third history book, "Masters of the Word," from Grove/Atlantic Press, explores the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics. His ultimate life goal is being able to convey a suitcase full of books and a laptop to Provence for six months and call it “work.”