There's no way to systematically beat the stock market in the short term, according to the lifetime work of American professors Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller - but you probably already knew that. The true merit of the Americans' work, which won the Nobel Prize in economics Monday morning, is its long term predictability, according to The Swedish Academy.

Farma, Hansen, and Shiller won for research that spanned 50 years and is at the foundation of market analysis, as per The Swedish Academy. Theirs will be the last Nobel Prize awarded this year, and the second - along with the literature prize - for a lifetime of work rather than a recent discovery.

The three worked as a perfect team, even if they never actually worked with each other. Farma laid the initial theoretical groundwork, Shiller constructed the model, and Hansen interpreted it.

The trail of their work - conducted separately and mostly in different decades - began in the 1960s when Eugene Farma first demonstrated the unpredictability of stocks in the short term, and that "new information is very quickly incorporated into prices," as per The Swedish Academy. These two discoveries dramatically influenced theoretical and real world events.

One real outcome was the rise of index funds, or a type of mutual fund that provides "broad market exposure, low operating expenses and low portfolio turnover," according to Investopedia.

"The Laureates have laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices. It relies in part on fluctuations in risk and risk attitudes, and in part on behavioral
biases and market frictions," concluded the Swedish Academy's press release.