Gene’s first really famous contributions came in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the general theme of “efficient markets.” “Efficient Capital Markets: a Review of Theory and Empirical Work ’’[15] is often cited as the central paper.
(Numbers refer to Gene’s CV.) “Efficiency” is not a pleasant adjective or a buzzword. Gene gave it a precise, testable meaning. Gene realized that financial markets are, at heart, markets for information.

Markets are “informationally efficient” if market prices today summarize all available information about future values.  Informational efficiency is a natural consequence of competition, relatively free entry, and low costs of information in financial markets. If there is a signal, not now incorporated in market prices, that future values will be high, competitive traders will buy on that signal. In doing so, they bid the price up, until the price fully reflects the available information.  Like all good theories, this idea sounds simple in such an overly simplified form. The greatness of Fama’s contribution does not lie in a complex “theory” (though the theory is, in fact, quite subtle and in itself a remarkable achievement).  Rather “efficient markets” became the organizing principle for 30 years of empirical work in financial economics.  That empirical work taught us much about the world, and in turn affected the world deeply.