Mark Ready holds the Jeffrey Diermeier Chair in the Department of Finance, Investment, and Banking at the Wisconsin School of Business. He came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, after completing his PhD at Cornell University.

From the outset, he has been able to bring a practical dimension to his courses, having spent seven years in various finance positions at Ford Motor Company before pursuing his Ph.D.

Ready’s research focus is in investments and he is well known and highly regarded in the academic community. His work has been cited in more than 450 separate articles published in finance and accounting journals, and he has served as associate editor for both the Review of Financial Studies and Financial Management. He has published studies examining risk and return of a variety of trading strategies, ranging from technical trading rules for timing market returns, to strategies that select individual stocks based on various fundamental measures.

Ready has taught both corporate and investments courses in the undergraduate, MBA, and executive programs, and he has served as chair of both the Finance Ph.D. program and the Quantitative Masters of Finance (QMF) program.

His most recent teaching assignment included the investments course taken by all first-year finance MBA students (both corporate finance and investment banking and applied security analysis).

Ready’s work has drawn the attention and respect of practitioners and regulators.

He served on NASDAQ’s Economic Advisory Board from 1998-2000, and he was the chief economist and director of the Office of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from April 2000 through January 2001.

Ready earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University.