Donald Luskin (born April 1954) is Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics LLC, a consulting firm he founded in 2001, providing investment strategy and macroeconomics forecasting and research for institutional investors. Luskin contributes commentaries on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and appears regularly on Fox Business. He was formerly a CNBC contributor, a contributing editor and columnist for National Review Online (NRO), and a columnist for TheStreet.com. His media commentaries and appearances touch on investing, economic and political matters.
Luskin has published three books, Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide, Portfolio Insurance: A Guide to Dynamic Hedging and I Am John Galt: Today's Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It (co-author Andrew Greta).
Luskin also wrote a blog, "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid," based on the title of his as-yet unpublished book. The blog's tagline was: "How big government, big business, big media and big academia block your road to financial freedom—and tell you it's for your own good." Luskin is a self-avowed libertarian, and his blog linked to other financial and political blogs espousing similar beliefs.
Biography and achievements
On his former blog, Luskin stated he "attended Yale in 1973–1974; dropped out to rejoin the real world as soon as possible."
After dropping out of college, Luskin worked for several years as a creative consultant to Los Angeles companies such as Mattel and Teledyne, and motion picture studios LucasFilm and Warner Brothers, where he worked on iconic films such as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Ken Russell's Altered States. He and two colleagues developed a series of all-night treasure-hunts, one of which was adapted into the Walt Disney motion picture Midnight Madness.
Luskin's investment career began in 1979, when he started a hedge fund while an options market maker on the Pacific Stock Exchange. As his fund grew and evolved, he became a market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (where he helped pioneer index options trading, executing the very first OEX contract) and the New York Stock Exchange, where he traded the first option contract in the NYSE's history.
In 1984 Luskin joined Jefferies & Co., a brokerage firm. There as senior vice president, he invented POSIT, a crossing network enabling institutional investors to exchange entire portfolios with each other. POSIT was later spun out of Jefferies as a separate publicly traded company, Investment Technology Group.
In 1987 Luskin joined Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, a division of Wells Fargo Bank, as senior vice president in charge of investment management and trading. He became vice chairman when the firm merged with Nikko Securities in 1989, becoming Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors. When the firm was acquired by Barclays Bank in 1995 and became Barclays Global Investors, Luskin became chief executive officer of the firm's global business in mutual funds. The firm was subsequently acquired by BlackRock. Over Luskin's eleven years with the firm, assets under management grew from $69 billion to over $500 billion. Luskin was responsible for numerous innovations in index funds and quantitative investing—including the development domestic and international quant-active funds, every one of which outperformed its benchmark over Luskin's tenure. Luskin developed the iShares ETF family and created the LifePath funds, the first target-date mutual funds, for which he is the named inventor on a US patent.