Michael Gorham

Notable Quote
When I finished my PhD at the University of Wisconsin, I felt I didn’t know very much.  Sure, I had studied the textbooks and papers, but I felt I lacked real‐world knowledge that I could pass on to others.  So I went out to begin learning.  I spent four years at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco doing research, writing articles and giving talks on a wide range of topics.  I then spent 18 years at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange developing new futures and options contracts for trading and marketing these products worldwide as the CME’s VP of International Market Development.  Finally, I felt that I had a little something to share, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past decade.   When I felt I needed a strong dose of the real work again, an opportunity arose that allowed me to go to Washington for two years to run a major division of the CFTC, the regulatory agency for futures markets.

What excites me about Stuart
Stuart has a tradition of attracting both professors and students with real‐world experience. I have a keen interest in not only the theory of how the world works, bur even more in the details of how it actually does work.   There is nothing I enjoy more than seeing students with a deep experience in some area from a job they currently hold or have previously held add serious depth and texture to a topic being discussed in the classroom.

My Teaching Philosophy
I’m a professor because I like to learn and I like to be involved in the learning of others.  I don’t believe in standing up and talking for two and a half hours.  Learning is an interactive process in which students have to be actively engaged.  In my classes, students engage in conversation and debate.  They ask questions, but they also answer questions from their own reading and experience.  In my classes, you can expect to be giving presentations, writing corporate memos to a CEO, and being an active participant.

My Teaching/Research Interests
I love markets.  I love figuring out how they are designed and how they can be improved.  I love exploring how they can be used to improve people’s lives.  I also enjoy the process of innovation and development and design of new financial products.  I’ve recently published two books on markets: India’s Financial Markets: An Insider’s Guide (with Ajay Shah and Susan Thomas, 2008) and Electronic Exchanges: The Global Transformation from Pits to Bits (with Nidhi Singh, 2009).  I teach Global Financial Markets and Market Microstructure in the MS in Finance program and Derivatives and Investments in the undergraduate program.