When Mark J. Ready visited the floor of the New York Stock Exchange while working on his doctorate in finance during the last 1980s, he fell in love. Not with a woman. The New Jersey native was a happily married man with a young family back in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was attending Cornell University.
Instead, Ready fell in love with the market itself, with its ebbs and flows of information among a sea of humanity striving to make a profit at every turn.
That infatuation has defined the rest of his career, which in 1990 brought him to a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. On Wednesday, he will take over one of the gems of the school, the Stephen L. Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis, becoming just the fourth director in the center’s 37-year history.