As Founder and Chairman of Stern Stewart & Co., it is an honor to welcome you to our site. My colleagues and I set an important objective when our firm opened for business in 1982. We wanted to apply the best quality research in finance theory and policy that had been developed at the premier graduate schools of business. Our focus was on the work of Merton H. Miller and Franco Modigliani who unveiled the possibilities of bringing more scientific analysis to financing decisions and strategic planning as a result of their path-breaking work in 1958. My teacher, Merton Miller, won the Nobel Prize for his brilliant insights in this paper.

I also had the great fortune of studying at The University of Chicago Booth School where my classmates included Michael Jensen, Richard Roll, and Myron Scholes. We had 14 students in our class with Professor Miller and I am proud to say that every one of them in some way extended the frontiers of thinking and practice in the fields of finance and strategy.

My focus was on how to use the theories to answer the most difficult questions for senior management and boards of directors:

• What is the required rate of return for risk?