One of the largest shareholders at Zurich-based Sika is Dimensional Fund Advisors, the Swiss business magazine «Bilanz» (in German) reports in its latest edition. One of its founders turns out to be the U.S. winner of a Nobel economics prize, Eugene Fama, now a director of the asset manager.

Sika, which is active globally in the building materials sector, recently settled a long-running and bitter battle between the family owners of the concern and its management, over an attempted sale to French rival Saint-Gobain.

DFA invested heavily in Sika shortly before the ownership struggle was settled, and benefited hugely from a rise in the share price. Up to April 30, barely two weeks before the settlement, some 1.16 million shares worth around 140 million Swiss francs were deposited with the U.S. concern, it reported.

Unpredictable Stock Price 

The total package is worth 222 million francs ($223.6 million), and DFA now holds more than 1 percent of Sika, and is ranked at 14th on the list of large investors.The 79-year-old, whose family roots go back to Italy, is one of the best known and oldest surviving economic scientists. He made a name for himself through his research into portfolio- and capital-market theory.

In 2013 he was – together with Robert Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen – awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In his dissertation, Fama had maintained that share prices were unpredictable, and subject rather to coincidence. In 1970 he coined the expression «market efficiency hypothesis», which has since been entered in several dictionaries.