Joseph Piotroski

Who is Joseph Piotroski?

Joseph D. Piotroski is an American professor who specializes in accounting and financial reporting issues. As of October 2010 he serves as associate professor of accounting at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business from July 1999 to June 2007.

Piotroski is known in the investing world for an influential 2000 paper he wrote while at the University of Chicago, entitled Value Investing: The Use of Historical Financial Statement Information to Separate Winners from Losers. In the piece, Piotroski laid out a way to buy and short stocks using several accounting-based criteria. His back-testing showed that the method would have produced returns well above the broader market averages over a two-decade period.

Piotroski is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting Research, and the Journal of Accounting and Economics. His research has been cited in publications such as Bloomberg BusinessWeek, SmartMoney Magazine, and Investor's Business Daily.