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  • 5 months ago
A group of University of Chicago pioneers in the 1950s leveraged early computer data analysis to revolutionize Wall Stre | dG1fbzNDemZ6X0FDMTQ
Transcript
00:01People are having a much better investment experience now than they did 50 years ago.
00:05It's pretty cool to see how that all happened.
00:07It's this belief system we have about how investing works.
00:11Who is we?
00:12Dimensional.
00:13We were in the right place at the right time.
00:15If we hadn't gone to Chicago then, we wouldn't be here today.
00:19My generation came along at the right time.
00:21Data was starting to be generated.
00:24Nobody had touched the data, so whatever you did was new.
00:27It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
00:30Did you realize that you were challenging how investing was done?
00:35Absolutely.
00:36That was fun.
00:37I loved it.
00:38We were armed with so much knowledge.
00:40We knew things that Wall Street didn't know.
00:42What's the difference between a data freak and a data dog?
00:45A freak thinks it's fun.
00:48In 1969, none of these professors had received a Nobel,
00:53but half a dozen of them or so became Nobel laureates.
00:56These are legends, and they were just floating around the finance department.
00:59Martin Miller explained this notion of efficient markets.
01:02I remember sitting there thinking, this makes everything make sense.
01:07I remember him saying three things that stuck with me forever.
01:10Markets work, costs matter, and diversification is your buddy.
01:14The real world was challenged by that way of thinking.
01:17The enemies of index funds were everywhere.
01:20Investment advice in those days was built around fear and greed.
01:23And to defeat such a mindset?
01:26You can show the data.
01:28By 1981, when we started Dimensional, a lot of people had moved to indexing.
01:33But people weren't investing in the stocks of smaller companies.
01:36We were the first people to treat small cap stocks as a separate asset category.
01:40It worked.
01:41Are you surprised?
01:42Of course not.
01:43Data doesn't lie.
01:45What investing is about is dealing with uncertainty.
01:49People want to shrink away from uncertainty.
01:51And it's uncertainty that really creates opportunity.
01:54What we have done is develop a framework.
01:58People started framing their portfolio in a much more constructive way.
02:02Fundamentally, people want to improve their lot in life.
02:05They want to improve the lives of their families.
02:08There's a lot of hope.
02:09Instead of rolling your hair out and watching financial news all day long, tune out the noise.
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