Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) and Vanguard have intersecting histories rooted in the development of the first-ever index fund. Vanguard's market-cap weighted index funds have been nothing short of revolutionary and they became synonymous with sensible investing for many good reasons, but Dimensional took implementing the ideas from academic finance a few steps further, leading to their own deserved acclaim. In today’s episode, Ben and Dan analyze over 30 years of history between DFA and Vanguard, from their founding and relationship to their rise as global leaders in asset management. We discover how their approaches to foundational finance theory differ, whether diversification is mostly semantics, and how DFA and Vanguard compare to one another over 25 years of matched US-domiciled mutual funds. We also discuss which approach is easier to implement, essential insights for fund advisors, DFA’s downsides despite its long-term outperformance of the Vanguard 500, and an uplifting cancer update from Ben in today’s After Show. For practical investment takeaways, tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
(0:01:14) Unpacking DFA and Vanguard’s history and relationship.
(0:03:10) Mac McQuown and the birth of index funds at Wells Fargo in 1964.
(0:07:48) How DFA and Vanguard became global leaders in asset management.
(0:10:43) Understanding DFA and Vanguard’s approach to foundational finance theory.
(0:19:34) The semantics of diversification.
(0:22:22) Comparing 25 years of matched Dimensional and Vanguard US mutual funds.
(0:33:36) Which fund advisor’s approach is easier for others to implement and why.
(0:39:30) How DFA has outperformed Vanguard in the long run (with downsides to consider).
(0:43:09) Recapping today’s conversation: what every fund advisor needs to know.
(0:46:41) The After Show: Ben’s cancer update, Dan as co-host, and listener reviews.
Read The Transcript:
Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from three Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Chief Investment Officer at PWL Capital, Dan Bortolotti, Portfolio Managers at PWL Capital.
Dan Bortolotti: Just the two of us today, Ben.
Ben Felix: Yes, a fairly rare occurrence in recent history, but we have done this before once in your early days.
Dan Bortolotti: Looking forward to doing it again. It's a good topic.
Ben Felix: I think it's a good topic for you and I to do together as well.
Dan Bortolotti: I think so.
Ben Felix: As we kind of highlighted in the recent AMA discussion.
Dan Bortolotti: Yes, it's something that both you and I have probably come to this question from two different ways, and it'll be interesting to talk about the ways those intersect.
Ben Felix: So, that main topic is DFA versus Vanguard, which we'll jump into in a second. In the after show, we have a few new, nice reviews that we'll go through. I do have an update on my health with some pretty good news. We're going to chat a little bit too about just a reflection on Dan being a co-host of the podcast for six months now, which, man, time flies.
Dan Bortolotti: I thought so too. When you told me six months, I didn't realize it had been that long. It's great.
Ben Felix: Well, let's jump into the main topic.
[EPISODE]
Ben Felix: DFA versus Vanguard. Most people know Vanguard. Anybody with even a passing interest in investing has heard of Vanguard. They're kind of synonymous with index funds, even though they do manage both index funds and active funds, but they're kind of synonymous with index funds. Our podcast audience is not included, but fewer people, generally speaking, have heard of Dimensional Fund Advisors. But the two companies have these connected histories and connected philosophies, I would argue as well. And they both stem from the genesis of the index investing revolution.
Vanguard is obviously well known for low-cost funds that track market indexes, which is an approach to investing supported by theory and evidence, as we discussed in a previous episode. Dimensional similarly applies theory and evidence to portfolio design, but unlike an index fund, they're actually trying to beat the market. That sounds good as a theoretical statement, but the obvious practical question is, does it actually work? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but we're going to talk about some pretty long-term data here that I think is an interesting example or illustration of what Dimensional is trying to do and has been able to do.
Important full disclosure, PWA Capital, as listeners know, uses Dimensional Fund Advisors products in our clients' portfolios. We're not paid by Dimensional. We use their F class mutual funds, so they don't pay us any commissions. There are no commissions paid to us, no kickbacks, nothing like that. We don't gain anything from sharing this information or discussing this other than educating people, which I guess indirectly can benefit us if they know that's what we do. Then, the other thing I'll say on this, just in terms of thinking about conflicts of interest is that, their products are available as ETFs. So, it's not like we're trying to say, hey, this thing is awesome, but you can only buy it from us. You can get them as ETFs. I really think that they're implementing some of the best ideas in finance and investing. I do invest all my own money, liquid money in their funds. That's the precursor there, or the disclaimer. I think this part's really interesting. The stories of these two companies, of Dimensional and Vanguard, they both start with Mac McQuown, who was the founding director of Dimensional, and prior to that was a co-creator of the first index fund. He was a guest on this podcast, in episode 182, which was a pretty cool discussion. He has unfortunately since passed away, but he's the guy that kind of all started there.
Mac joined a quantitative investment strategy think tank inside of Wells Fargo in 1964, and he assembled his team of academics to work on quant investing strategies. Six of the people in that group eventually went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their respective works. It was a pretty serious group of people. They didn't know that at the time. I'm sure they knew they were all pretty sharp, but I don't think they knew at the time that they're all going to go on to win Nobel Prizes, but you look back, and it's like, man, that's pretty crazy.
Dan Bortolotti: They left a pretty incredible legacy. It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall in those early discussions to see if they had any sense of the history that they were eventually going to make together and separately.
Ben Felix: It really is crazy. And they couldn't have known. Indexing didn't become a huge thing until relatively recently.
Dan Bortolotti: Well, yes, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that, but this was anything but an overnight success. It took; I'd say 40 years for it to really become mainstream. It's a long time.
Ben Felix: Now, they all had success academically. That aside, but still, it's crazy to look back and just think what index funds have become and what all of those individuals who participated ended up doing.
Dan Bortolotti: I'm sure they would have never seen it unfolding the way it did. Nobody would have foreseen ETFs for example as what really allowed people to implement indexing strategies more cheaply than ever before. A lot of innovation between now and then.
Ben Felix: I think the other important thing to keep in mind is that, in this setting, when this is happening, when these guys are figuring this stuff out, and working on what eventually became the first index fund, there was a renaissance happening in academic finance around the same time. I think it's important to keep in mind, for context, what was happening around the same time that these guys are working on this. It's 1964, they're working on what would eventually become the first index fund.
There's also this renaissance happening in academic finance that, today, we look back on as the stuff you learn about a business school. But back then, it was pretty new. Harry Markowitz's work on the importance of diversification had come out 12 years prior. Fama's work on efficient markets, which suggested that outperforming the market should be pretty hard, was brand new at the time. And Bill Sharpe's work on the capital asset pricing model, which allowed portfolio performance to be largely explained by explosion of market risk. Was published in the same year, but he'd been working on it prior to publication, obviously. So, all this stuff is happening, and the theory that these guys are working on, and the evidence that people were starting to generate by applying what these guys had been working on was really suggesting that the typical investment approach of picking stocks, and timing the market was probably not as useful as had previously been imagined, and that maybe active managers weren't doing anything special beyond maybe taking different amounts of market risk an d charging high fees for the service, which led them to just underperform pretty significantly.
Then, the logic that follows from that is, if active managers don't beat the market and returns primarily come from market risk would be kind of sensible to minimize costs and capture market returns. That's kind of where these guys arrive, based on that premise that this group of what turned out to be brilliant people. We're brilliant people at the time, but we know now the magnitude of their brilliance. They're all together at Wells Fargo and they come up with this idea that, "Hey, we have these indexes. We know that people are underperforming them. Why don't we just build a product that just invests in the index?"
Dan Bortolotti: What a crazy idea.
Ben Felix: Instead of trying to beat the market, why don't we just replicate it and we can minimize the cost? So, they did that. They built a large-cap index fund that was deployed by Wells Fargo Investment Advisors for the pension plan of Samsonite. It's a funny little detail in the story, the luggage maker. So, they had a, whatever defined benefit pension plan. They had to invest the assets. So, they engaged with Wells Fargo, and they deploy the first-ever index fund.
Now, due to the Glass-Steagall Act, Wells Fargo was not able to distribute these funds to retail investors. So, they had this inside of their kind of institutional business, but they couldn't create a product for retail investors. But they kind of realised the potential impact of their innovation. So, they ended up giving their research for free to John Bogle, who was eventually the founder of Vanguard, because he was also interested in implementing these ideas.
Dan Bortolotti: Can you imagine how they feel about that today? I don't know if you could patent the index fund, but certainly, it had a little more you than they ascribed to it at that time.
Ben Felix: It really is crazy to think about.
Dan Bortolotti: That said, as we're going to discover here, it's not like Bogle profited from that quickly. I mean, of course, he eventually did quite handsomely, but it took a very long time.
Ben Felix: But it is crazy, like knowing what we know now about what Vanguard became, what index funds became, the fact that these guys, these academics who are working inside Wells Fargo just said to Bogle, "Here you go, take it and make something cool," which he did, and then, some. So, Vanguard launches the first large cap equity index mutual fund available to retail investors in 1976. Now, the initial launch as the story goes was a bit of a flop. They didn't get nearly as much investment as they were hoping to or expecting to. The index fund was referred to as Bogle's folly for a period of time. But Vanguard has since become just a behemoth. They're one of the largest asset managers in the world. They had more than $10 trillion under management when I wrote these notes. That wouldn't have changed that much since then. They manage a lot of money.
Dan Bortolotti: I remember the story and I don't know if it's true, and I also don't know whether it applies to the Wells Fargo version or the initial Vanguard one. But, that they didn't actually have enough seed money to effectively buy all 500 stocks in the index, so they had to do some representative sampling. That's pretty amazing. I mean, it speaks to, I guess, how maybe the stocks were not quite as liquid back then as they are today. But still, you would have only had to have maybe a couple of million dollars to be able to do that. If it's not a true story, it should be
Ben Felix: I believe it, though, because I know that they did get way less than they expected or hoped to launch the fund. So, that fits with my understanding of the history too. Now, Vanguard, I mentioned this earlier, they're best known for the index fund products. That's kind of what made them a household name. But Vanguard's also one of the largest active managers in the world. They have around $1.8 trillion – of the $10, $1.8 trillion in actively managed funds, which is just an interesting detail about Vanguard. I think people don't realize that they're one of the largest active managers in the world.
Dan Bortolotti: They've done a pretty good job of being stealthy about that. You're right, virtually, everybody identifies them with the index fund. In their defence. I mean, you could argue they're just playing both sides, which is fine, but their active funds are the cheapest available. They're only a little bit more expensive than the index funds. And so, as we've said many times, if you're going to make an attempt to beat the market, and you keep your cost extremely low, you at least have a fighting chance. You're not charging 150 basis points for it. You might be charging 10. And if that's the case, well then, at least, you have a shot.
Ben Felix: Yes, it shifts the whole distribution of expected outcomes in your favor. And if you really want to beat the market, you don't have a chance with an index fund. You do with a bit of active management.
Dan Bortolotti: It's true.
Ben Felix: I think their actively managed funds are respectable. They're low fee. They're not like crazy high turnover or anything like that. They've done a decently good job. So, that's Vanguard. Dimensional Fund Advisors, which is led by David Booth, who we have also had as a guest on this podcast. He had previously been part of that Wells Fargo group that created the first index fund, the first institutional index fund. He launched this first small-cap fund in 1981. Dimensional is a lot smaller than Vanguard, but it's still one of the world's largest asset managers. They had over $800 billion in their management when I wrote these notes, probably around the same still.
I wrote these about a month ago. Booth's idea when he launched Dimensional, there was no factor premiums back then. That's an interesting part of the Dimensional story. Booth wasn't like, "Yeah, I'm going to do a small-cap value fund because they've got higher expected returns." That wasn't what he was thinking about. He was thinking about, "Hey, there are a lot of institutions out there like the Samsonite Pension Plan that have large cap portfolios just like we built for them at Wells Fargo. They can probably use some small caps to diversify. So, I'm going to build a diversified small-cap fund for people that are overexposed large caps, so they can have a more diversified portfolio look more like the market."
Now, small-cap funds were expensive to trade is one thing. But then, the other thing, there was no small-cap index at the time. So, Booth couldn't just say, I'm going to track to his index. So, for those two reasons, probably the second one more than the first, because there was no index to track. But even if there was, they probably wouldn't have done it because of the trading cost. So, Dimensional didn't implement an index fund. They just implemented this diversified, but flexible portfolio that was designed to capture the small-cap universe of stocks in the US. It looks a lot like an index fund, more like an index fund than a traditional actively managed fund because it was low cost, diversified, didn't trade much, all that kind of stuff. But it was not technically an index fund, and Dimensional still does not technically make index funds. But I think that's a common perception that index funds are inherently good. The marketing around index funds has just been so good for good reasons. It's a great story and it's a true story, but I think there's a perception that index funds are good, everything else is bad. But I don't think that's necessarily true. As we just talked about with Vanguard's actively managed stuff, the reasons cap weighted index funds make sense is because they're low-cost and broadly diversified, and they beat the vast majority of actively managed funds most of the time. They're tax-efficient, they're easy to understand, and they're consistent with foundational finance theory. All true, all super important, but using an index fund is not the only way to achieve those characteristics with an investment.
Dan Bortolotti: One of the things that I thought was really interesting, you would know the details better than me, Ben. But if you look at something like DFA's Canadian Equity Fund, it holds way more stocks than even the composite index. You could probably make an argument that there's significantly better coverage of the total market with a fund like that, than there is with an index fund. Obviously, there are exceptions, but the TSX composite, the best-known index in Canada holds what? Two hundred thirty, 240 stocks, something like that. But there's far more public companies than that. So, there's a lot of things. Now, they're very small, but they're left out of the index. If your fund holds all of the stocks in the index plus another 100 or 200, you could argue that that's a better reflection of the total market.
Ben Felix: You could argue that, which may not always be a good thing. I've actually been working on a topic on – I sent you this paper a while ago, Dan. We're going to have Marcus Simon back on to talk about it. The way that index funds are implemented, where they trade in an effort to reflect the market, they'll trade stuff like new IPOs. They'll trade based on buybacks; they'll trade based on new share issuance. Sometimes that can actually be detrimental. The fact that Dimensions holds more stocks is another reason that they have to be super careful as they are on implementation, because you don't want to rush to buy all the new IPOs, which can have a pretty significant cost drag on the portfolios.
Dan Bortolotti: Pros and cons of that approach.
Ben Felix: Totally. Fewer issues like that with something like XIC. This is really the edges of the market where there can be some pretty ugly stuff that you might want to avoid. So, Dimensional launches, we're in 1981. David Booth has launched this thing thinking that, "Hey, we're going to offer diversification to institutions that are over-investing in large caps. Soon after that, Rolf Banz, who is one of Eugene Fama's Ph.D. students publishes a paper on the small-cap premium. So, he finds in that paper that small stocks had systematically higher returns than could be explained by their exposure to market risk. So, it's kind of like a happy surprise I guess for David Booth.
Not only is there a diversification benefit, but these things might actually have higher expected returns. Then, following the small-cap premium, research comes out showing other systematic premiums, like where stocks with certain characteristics perform better than Bill Sharpe's CAPM theory would predict. The big examples are the value premium, which came after the size premium. So, stocks with low prices relative to their fundamentals tend to outperform all else equal. And the profitability premium, another big one, the dimensional still implements, that stocks with stronger profitability tend to outperform, all else equal.
Those finding at the time, they kind of seem to violate market efficiency. One the papers in the value premium, can't remember the specific title, but it was titled basically challenging market efficiency. Something to that effect, because there is this systematic mispricing. There are two explanations. If market risk is what explains differences in returns, and some types of stocks have systematically higher returns than theory predicts. There are two possible explanations. Markets are not efficient, or we need a better model for what an efficient market should behave like. So, that's what led Fama and French to propose a new asset pricing model. So, Bill Sharpe had his capital asset pricing model, which predicted that exposure to market risk was really the only driver of expected returns. It was the only driver of expected returns. But that model had struggled empirically. There are all these things like the size premium and the value premium that were kind of breaking the CAPM. And so, Fama and French, based on that observation that CAPM was struggling a bit, they suggested in what is now a seminal 1992 paper. That in addition to market risk, the unique risks of small-cap stocks and value stocks might be needed to explain differences in expected returns. It might be needed to explain how an efficient market behaves. That's 1992 paper.
Then, they've got the 2015 paper, which is also highly cited from Fama and French, suggesting that, hey, profitability and investment are additional factors. There are still some anomalies out there with this three-factor model, adding these two other factors which have some very light theoretical support. Fama is pretty explicit to say that these are empirical models, but they do go through an exercise-based on the dividend discount model to explain why these factors do make sense, but it's still not a theoretical model. So then, we've got five factors. Then, there's a 2017 paper from Fama and French where they say, "Hey, this five-factor model thing, it also works really well in international markets." So, those five factors, that's the market risk premium, size, value, profitability, and investment. They're able to explain the vast majority. I think it's around 95% of differences in returns between diversified portfolios. So, that means, that if we take two different funds, say, two different actively managed funds, or maybe an index fund, and an actively managed fund, and they have different returns, and we're wondering why do they have different returns. Most of that difference is likely going to be explained by factors in the model. That's kind of why it's interesting.
It's important because if an active manager has been beating the market just by taking these systematic risks and charging whatever, 2% for it, if you can come out with a systematic product that does the same thing for 0.5 % to 0.2%, that's obviously a better deal for investors. Larry Swedroe titled the book in 2020, The Incredible Shrinking Alpha. And he's basically just alluding to the fact that what used to look like excess risk adjusted returns, which we call alpha, based on Michael Jensen's 1968 paper, that alpha is being increasingly explained by exposures to additional systematic risks. That by a factor asset pricing model today, but to the workhorse model in academic finance.
So, Dimensional has maintained really close ties to academia. They're still right in there withFama and French, but also with other academics like Robert Novy-Marx, for example, that are kind of on the cutting edge of this type of research. They do have exposure to small caps, but also value stocks, stocks with robust profitability. Then, they've also built an exclusion the way they treat investment a little bit different. But they do account for the investment factor in their portfolios. Those are all designed to give Dimensional an edge over market-cap weight index funds. They're trying to beat the market.
The line between indexing, like Vanguard market-cap indexing, active management, like picking stocks and timing the market, and what Dimensional is doing is kind of blurry. Dimensional sits somewhere in between. What unites them or the unifying piece between Dimensional and index funds is that taking risk, not picking stocks or timing the market is what is going to explain differences in returns. The difference is that market capitalization index funds deliver the market risk premium. That's it. That's all, which is fine. And Dimensional funds aim to deliver the same market premium, market risk premium, but also the size, value, profitability, and in a slightly different way, investment premiums.
The main idea there, or one of them at least, is that building portfolios around multiple risk premiums should increase the portfolios the returns. And again, they are trying to beat the market, but it should also increase the reliability of the long-term returns of a portfolio because different risk premiums will show up at different times. It's not quite diversification. This is always a funny debate in the rational minor community because some people really want to call it diversification. Dimensional does not like to call it diversification, because increasing the weight of certain types of stocks within the market, you're not adding anything. You're not adding any new securities to say you're more diversified, but you are giving yourself exposure to more independent risk premiums. So, is that diversification or is it increasing reliability? I think that's a semantic question that probably doesn't matter much.
Dan Bortolotti: If you think of what diversification is intended to accomplish, it's to make sure that your portfolio is exposed to many different risks, and it isn't hugely vulnerable to any single risk. I would agree with you. I think it's just semantic argument. You're adding different types of risk to your portfolio or adding multiple securities to the portfolio. It's two different techniques for accomplishing a similar goal. I trust Dimensional on articulating these things much more than I would trust myself.
Ben Felix: There's even a paper about factor diversification, saying that ‘The Death of Diversification Has Been Greatly Exaggerated.’ It's a Dimensional quirk, I think, to say that it's not diversification. It does fit many of the characteristics of diversification, semantics, but they pull you in.
What we've talked about is all pretty theoretical. I think it brings us back to the original question, which is, has this worked? Is Dimensional's academic approach adding value over the relative simplicity of Vanguard's market-cap-weighted index funds? Comparing Dimensional's performance to a market-cap weighted index is still an interesting exercise, but indexes don't reflect fees, transaction costs, from withholding taxes for international and emerging markets, and other real-life implementation frictions that a live fund has to endure in order to capture returns.
But I think, comparing Dimensional funds to live Vanguard funds gives a more realistic and vestibule benchmark. What could you actually have done instead of what did the index do? It gives us a really interesting laboratory to compare the two approaches, and because they have this long-shared history, other than that, connected history being really interesting. I think it gives us a really good setup to compare long histories of live fund returns. So, again, as I mentioned a few times, Vanguard is best known for their market-cap weighted index funds. They do also have style funds representing the types of stocks that dimensional targets like value stocks and small-cap value stocks.
I don't have that many in here, but I will where I can compare Dimensional to Vanguard's market-cap funds. Just to say, "Hey." Forgetting about who took more risk and that kind of stuff because that could get pretty complicated, but just did tilting toward factors outperform the market, which is one of the intentions. But then I also want to look at where we can in cases where Vanguard is tilting toward similar factors, how do they compare? How did Dimensional and Vanguard compare?
That second comparison with style funds, it highlights just an interesting point that we'll come back to when we get there. So, what we're going to compare is the full histories of matched Dimensional and Vanguard U.S.-domiciled mutual funds, with at least 25 years of history. So, I kind of just combed through all of their historical funds, told the ones with 25 years of history, "There's not a survivor bias issue here. They don't close funds."
Dan Bortolotti: Well, that's interesting in and of itself. A lot of fund companies throw a whole lot of stuff at the wall, and fold all the funds that don't work into the ones that do, and then claim a longer history. A lot of those funds that have been around for a long time have enormous assets and have not changed their mandates for years. They've had one job, and they've done it well.
They don't launch fringe products. They don't launch trendy products. You can be pretty confident if you buy a Vanguard fund, you're probably going to be able to hold it for decades.
Ben Felix: Generally true. They did have a foray into factor investing, and a lot of those funds did close down, because I remember, I would get a lot of questions about Vanguard's factor products when they were around, and they might still have some open, but they had a whole wave of closures in Europe, and I think in Canada too, where a bunch of the factor products disappeared. But in general, I agree, they've been super consistent, similar to Dimensional. I don't know if it's true that Dimensional has never closed a fund. I'd have to double check on that, but it's not a common occurrence for sure. Their oldest fund, for example, is still open even though it has not beaten the market, which we'll talk about in a second. So, we have this big list of funds with past performance. Then, the performance ends February 14, 2025. That's when I prepared the data for this. When I posted a video on this on my YouTube channel, people joke that I spent my Valentine's Day collecting the data. That's not true. Return data is always available as of the previous trading day. So, if I had data as of February 14th, I collected it on February 15th.
Dan Bortolotti: Your wife was quick to point that out.
Ben Felix: I do think it's worth mentioning that this is not a case of combing through a database and finding funds with good past performance, and then saying, "Hey, look, we found funds with good past performance." That would not be that interesting. We are going to talk about funds that have not outperformed. Some funds are going to do well over any historical period just due to luck. So, combing through the database or data mining those and saying, "Hey, look, I don't think that's super interesting. There's no reason to expect those funds to continue doing well in the future." It should be super skeptical if they see someone touting like, "Hey, look, this actively managed fund has performed really well in the past." Skepticism is warranted with what we're about to talk about here as well.
I think what's interesting in this case is that, theory and evidence predicted that these funds would outperform the market in the long run many, many years ago. And for the most part, they have actually done that. I think that's pretty interesting. David Booth would have told you, in 1990, "Yes, we expect this value and small cap thing to work out over the next 50 years." We don't have 50 years yet, I guess, if we started in 1990. We got a lot, a lot of years.
So, Dimensional's first fund, which is the DFA U.S. Microcap portfolio, it has underperformed the Vanguard 500 index fund, at least as of February 14th. So, that's since inception, going back to December 1981. Now, most of that underperformance, when you look at the chart, most of it comes in the last five years, where U.S. large cap growth stocks have just been on an unstoppable epic run. Will that turn around? I don't know. If you look at rolling periods, it doesn't look so bad. It has beaten the Vanguard small-cap index fund since the Vanguard funds conversion from an active fund to an index fund in September 1989. If we look from that period, September 1989, The DFA fund, the microcap fund has beaten not only the Vanguard small-cap index fund, but also the Vanguard 500 index fund over that period. Shows how sensitive some of the stuff can be to start and end dates. The DFA U.S. small-cap portfolio, slightly larger in size than the microcap portfolio, but we're still in the small-cap space.
It has underperformed the Vanguard 500 index fund, but outperformed the Vanguard small-cap index fund since its inception in 1992, March 1992. The DFA U.S. large cap value portfolio has trailed the Vanguard 500 index fund, but beaten the Vanguard value index fund since the DFA funds inception in February 1993. DFA U.S. small-cap value portfolio has beaten the Vanguard 500 index fund and the Vanguard small-cap index fund since the DFA funds inception in March 1993. Now, Vanguard did launch a small-cap value index fund in May 1998, and the DFA small- cap value fund has beaten it by a pretty wide margin since its inception.
We'll try and get the charts for all of these as I'm saying them into the video. Then both funds, the Vanguard fund and the DFA fund, have beaten the Vanguard 500 fund over that same period from May 1998 to February 14, 2025. The DFA large cap international portfolio has outperformed the Vanguard total international stock index fund since the Vanguard funds inception in April 1996. Now, one note on the international, it's a bit of a quirk here. They're both called international portfolios. Vanguard includes emerging markets, dimensional doesn't. So, it does muddy up the comparison a little bit. However, Emerging markets actually outperformed developed over this period. If anything, that should make Vanguard look better, not worse. I could have tried to splice together some developed and emerging or tried to cut out somehow emerging markets, but it becomes really messy really quickly.
Dan Bortolotti: Does Dimensional's international equity funds always exclude emergingmarkets or just the specific one?
Ben Felix: For the U.S.-listed funds, I think that they do exclude them. I haven't checked all of their funds to say that that's true, but the ones that I'm looking at here, they do exclude them. It's pretty confusing. If you're trying to understand past fund performance, the Canadian Dimensional mutual funds, when they say international, they have international developed and emerging markets. Their U.S. funds seem to have only developed and then they have separate emerging markets funds.
Dan Bortolotti: That's what I was going to ask. They don't roll them in together into the same fund, they have emerging markets funds, but you've got to buy them, each sold separately as they used to say.
Ben Felix: Yes, in the U.S., and then in Canada, they're combined. Makes it hard to compare past performance if you don't really dig into what's actually inside of the funds. Then, Vanguard calling it international, but including emerging markets, that's also a little bit confusing. Fund names can often be very misleading. The DFA international value and small-cap value portfolios have beaten the Vanguard total international stock index fund since the Vanguard funds inception in April 1996. Same thing with the emerging markets, they actually outperformed over that period, which would have helped Vanguard out a little bit. In emerging markets, the DFA emerging markets portfolio beat the Vanguard emerging market stock index fund since the Vanguard funds inception in May 1994. Then, Dimensional goes on to launch three more emerging markets funds, which have all gone on to outperform the Vanguard emerging markets stock index fund. And then, the last one, I'll mention here is the DFA U.S. targeted value portfolio. It has pretty seriously outperformed the Vanguard 500 index fund, since the DFA funds inception in February 2000. I mentioned the sensitivity to start and end dates earlier. If we look back in time now, we know that that was either the worst time ever to invest in U.S. large caps, or the best time ever to launch a small cap value fund. Take that for what it is, I guess.
Dan Bortolotti: If you move that start date to 2010, I'm guessing you're going to get a different number still over 15 years.
Ben Felix: That's exactly it, yes. Based on a comment on my YouTube video on this, I did look at rolling performance, rolling period performance over five-year periods. I don't have that data in front of me right now, but it was all very favourable. It was all over 50% of rolling periods, typically well over 50% that Dimensional was outperforming.
Dan Bortolotti: You've compared a lot of these to the Vanguard 500, which tracks the S&P 500. It's maybe worth stressing just how difficult that index has been to beat since its creation, but certainly in the last 30 years or so. Anybody that can beat the S&P 500 with a U.S. fund has done incredibly well and would be in a very, very small group.
Ben Felix: Yes, that's very true. One thing that jumps out, I think, in those comparisons is that Dimensional's performance has generally been better in international development and emerging markets than it has in the U.S. market. I mean, that speaks to what you just said, Dan, that U.S. large-cap growth stocks or large-cap stocks more generally have just been nearly impossible to beat for anybody. I was doing some research a while ago, just trying to look for really good managers that had major flameouts, and so many of the really interesting stories are value managers, who over the last 10 or so years have just not been able to keep up, and they end up closing down, based on underperformance.
It is well documented. We talked about this briefly after we had Andrew Chen on. Andrew Chen basically says, there are no more anomaly premiums in the U.S. market when you account for costs. But there's other research showing that, well, that is true, and that is fairly well- documented, that premiums have been pretty muted in the US. Outside the U.S., they've actually been quite strong. We see that in the performance of Dimensional's funds. But to your point a second ago, Dan, it is still pretty impressive that Dimensional has had some outperformance in the U.S. market over that period.
Whether the factor premium thing, like whether the performance of U.S. large-cap growth and the underperformance of factor premiums in the U.S. is a permanent structural change, which is what Andrew Chen argued, or is itself an anomaly that we're seeing anomalous high returns for large-cap growth stocks. That's something we can't know. Time will tell. But it is interesting to look at the U.S. market today. Valuations have come down a little bit since I wrote this, but valuations are still pretty high. But in the year 2001, valuations were super high. We could have been having the same conversation, looking at how poorly value and small-cap value had done relative to the market.
Then, as everybody knows that, reversed fairly aggressively. I think, overall, Dimensional's ideas are impressive, and their implementation is impressive. And the fact that they've done pretty well by taking this academic research that says, "Hey, this stuff kind of should work," and Dimensional has shown that it actually can and actually does. I think that's pretty cool and pretty interesting.
It suggests, I think, that insights from academic finance are not just curiosities. They're practically useful to investors beyond the big insight that, "Hey, you can't really beat the market very easily, not without taking on more risk." But Dimensional is showing that there may be other risk that you can take that can pay off in the long run. Then, another insight I think is interesting that comes from these data is that, whether it's dimensional or Vanguard, because keep in mind,Vanguard has these style funds too, tilting toward styles like value and small-cap value can actually have merit. We've talked about this before then. There are periods where factors suck for a long period of time, but there are periods where the market sucks for a long period of time too.
Dan Bortolotti: If your goal is to try to assess those factors and implement them in your strategy, I would argue you're better off going with Dimensional than you are with Vanguard style funds. For example, Dimensional, whatever your preference is, market-cap weighting versus factors, it's pretty hard to argue that this is a company that takes implementation of these ideas extremely seriously and they do a phenomenally good job in doing it. If you are going to see, say, underperformance in a dimensional fund compared with a cap-weighted benchmark, you're not going to see it because of poor implementation. You're going to see it because the factor premium didn't show up during that period. That's not something you can say about any fund company.
Ben Felix: Yes, I mentioned that idea of index funds trading into stuff that has low expected returns and out of stuff that has high expected returns, kind of around the edges of the market when the composition of the market changes. Marco Salmon has this paper showing that that costs index and requires some explanation, but that costs index investors they find between 32 and 81 basis points relative to what is the question. So, the way that they measure that is that they have an index fund strategy that rebalances in the same way that an index fund would. So, quarterly on a calendar basis.
Then, they compare that to an index fund that delays rebalancing. So, it rebalances daily with a rolling look-back period, and the look-back period determines how long they'll wait before implementing changes to the market composition. If there's an IPO, if their look-back period is a year, they're not going to add that IPO until after a year. They compare the real-life version of an index fund, like the quarterly calendar rebalancing, to these various look-back periods. They find that the longer you wait to implement those changes to market composition, the higher the returns of the index fund are.
All that to say, just on implementation, Dimensional does have a total market fund that isdesigned to not give you any factor exposure. It's designed to give you the U.S. market return, but they implemented the way that they would implement any other Dimensional fund. So, it's flexible, it doesn't track an index. It doesn't rebalance on a specific day, which can have effects on the price that you pay for securities, and that you sell securities at. And it doesn't jump into IPOs, all that kind of stuff. So, because I was looking into this topic, I looked at the performance of that fund versus VTI. The dimensional fund has a nine-basis point fee, VTI has three basis points. But since it listed as an ETF in, I think it's March 2021, and it's outperformed by about 35 basis points, annualized over that period, which is almost exactly what Marco's paper predicts. That's probably noise, but it's kind of neat.
Dan Bortolotti: That's interesting noise though, isn't it? I've had this discussion with clients and people who are more into the theory of it. I think it's important to remember when indexes were created, they were not created as an investment strategy. They were created as a benchmark of the overall market and they did an extraordinarily good job at that. It was only much later that people looked at them and said, "Hey, what if we bought the market and if you're going to buy the market, what do you do? Buy all the stocks in the index in the same proportion?" And so, there are some frictions based on that, and those are real for sure. Now, I think you would argue compared to the costs of most active management, compared to the high costs of most other alternatives, the index fund is the best of the bunch.
But in theory, if you could take all of the good things about the index fund and tweak at the margins to get rid of some of their faults, which is exactly what you're saying dimensional is trying to do. If you can do that successfully, it wouldn't surprise me if you saw some modest outperformance. The danger is, I can't think of a specific example, but there are definitely fund companies who have tried to do this. I'm going to start with an indexing remiss, but I'm just going to make a few tweaks here and there, and they backfire. So, you have to be very careful about what those tweaks are going to be if you are skilled at it, and you work on the right things, and you trim in the right places. It wouldn't surprise me very much if you got a little bit of outperformance at the margins.
Ben Felix: I would love to see other fund companies see Marco's research, hopefully get some traction, and see that maybe we don't have to exactly follow the index. Why don't we just build a fund that is a total market fund, but not an index? Track something like the total market, but implement a little bit differently, which is what Dimensional has done. I guess there's not a lot of margins in it, because as soon as you add margin for the fund company, all the benefits go away. Dan Bortolotti: Exactly. You could pay somebody to do all that work and that's going to have to detract. Then, at what point does it become counterproductive? I don't know. For most funds, it is counterproductive.
Ben Felix: Exactly. I've written most of that topic, so we'll do a future episode on that. That'll be a fun one too. We've made this all sound pretty rosy, that these academic ideas work and Dimensional has outperformed in the long run. That all sounds pretty good, but there's an important downside to Dimensional funds, which is that, they're going to perform differently from the market over time. We talked about this a bunch in the AMA episode, Dan. They're exposed to different risk premiums. Different risk premiums pay off at different times. I mentioned that a minute ago as a benefit, which I think it kind of is in the long run. It's reasonable to expect a small benefit for taking on those risk exposures. But just like there can be periods of outperformance, there can also be periods of underperformance, like as we just mentioned, the recent history in the U.S. market, where tilting toward value and small cap value really sucked. Over the last 10 years, again, this is ending February 14th, the DFA U.S. small-cap value portfolio has trailed the Vanguard 500 index fund by 4.5% points annualized for 10 years.
Dan Bortolotti: It's a big gap.
Ben Felix: That's no joke.
Dan Bortolotti: It takes a very patient investor to endure something like that. We all know how impatient most people are, most investors are. They lose the confidence in a strategy that is "not working" after a year or two, let alone 10. Ten by a pretty significant margin. So, you need to be in it for the long haul and don't underestimate how difficult it is to hang on to that strategy when it underperforms for 10 years.
Ben Felix: That has happened before, worse even. So, from its inception in 1993 to February of 2000, the DFA U.S. small-cap value portfolio trailed the Vanguard 500 index fund by 6.35% points annualized. I guess it's not quite as long, seven years, but more underperformance on an annualized basis. Now, in that case, David Booth used to joke, that he probably still does joke, that they have a knack for launching products right before they go out of favor. They launch the small-cap value portfolio, and then, it just gets smoked for seven years. But in that case, things did turn around for a small-cap value. When the dot-com crash happened, small-cap value stocks went on to deliver annualized returns over 9%, annualized through the so-called loss decade in the U.S., while the U.S. market was effectively flat. Periods of pain, but then we get a decade of basically a 9% excess return.
Now, it is important to remember that while they've struggled in the U.S, value, and small-cap value, they've still performed relatively well in markets outside the U.S. in recent history. And over past periods of small-cap value outperformance in the U.S., at least in the data presented earlier in this video, dimensional funds have been able to capture more of the premiums than Vanguard funds with similar styles. So, kind of to your point earlier, Dan, when these premiums do deliver, and it's not just implementation. Dimensional also has more exposure, like they own smaller and cheaper stocks. A DFA and a Vanguard small-cap value fund are almost not even comparable, because Dimensional has so much per tilts. That's just a product decision. Then, the implementation is another piece of that. They do that efficiently, but it's also just much different risk exposures. So, I think if you want those risk exposures, Dimensional does a really good job delivering them.
Now, I can't tell you how the current period of U.S. underperformance is going to play out. We do know that despite those two historical periods that we just talked about, a pretty extreme pain for extended periods of time, the U.S. small -cap value portfolio has beaten the Vanguard 500index fund over its lifetime. No pain, no gain, I guess, but it is pain. It's not a joke. They're called risk premiums for a reason. Sometimes it sucks to pursue them. That's kind of it. So, Dimensional and Vanguard are these two fund companies with really connected histories that I think is pretty interesting that stem from the development of the first ever index fund. Vanguard's market-cap weighted index funds have been nothing short of revolutionary, and I don't think that's hyperbolic at all, for investors, and they become synonymous with sensible investing for good reason.
Dimensional took implementing the ideas from academic finance a few steps further than Vanguard did, and they're lesser known. That's partially their own doing. They don't really market much. I guess Vanguard doesn't really either, though. But lesser known, they've got this impressive track record, but nobody knows who they are unless you're a finance geek. Through a lot of Dimensional's history, the funds were only available to institutions. They started out as an institutional manager, or to retail investors through financial advisors. That was their next iteration. So, they said, okay, we'll move away from institutions, but we're only going to go through advisors. And that at the time was to limit cash flow volatility going into and out of their funds they didn't want to deal with. Managing portfolios with performance chasing behaviour from investors. So, they thought, advisors could shield them that.
They started launching ETFs in the U.S. market in 2020, and they've now got a full suite of the strategies available as U.S. listed ETFs. And then, of course, Avantis also launched ETFs in 2019, also U.S. listed. They do sub-advice some funds for manual life that have ETFs here in Canada. Not crazy about them, but they are out there. Then, of course, they have their mutual funds in Canada, and those are still only available through advisors for the time being. I would definitely say it's not worth paying a financial advisor's fee for access to Dimensional funds. We've gotten that call a few times where someone's like, "Hey, I want to pay you either your normal fee or a discounted fee or whatever just to invest in dimensional funds." And we reject them every time because it just doesn't make sense.
Based on our expected returns for the factor tilts, they're not huge. I think it's like 40 basis points or something. If you're paying even 30 basis points and fees to own that, it's not going to make a whole lot of sense. The actual fees on dimensional funds, their 60-40 global portfolio based on the most recent MRFP is down to 28 basis points, which is pretty good.
Dan Bortolotti: Comparable to the asset allocation ETFs by iShares, Vanguard, BMO, same ballpark.
Ben Felix: So, I wouldn't pay an advisor just for Dimensional funds, but I think it is worth finding one that either uses or could use Dimensional funds. If someone comes to you, Dan, you know the literature. I mean, you guys have access to Dimensional funds if you wanted to, but you have the knowledge base that a Dimensional advisor would have. I think that's really what investors should be looking for when they seek out financial advice.
Dan Bortolotti: Like anything else, you're going to want your advisor to understand the investment strategy and the products that they use really well. If you were able to access Dimensional funds through an advisor who just saw them on a huge menu that included a lot of other garbage, it's the wrong fit. I'm sure there's no sort of exclusivity contract, but if you're an advisor who is kind of on the approved list, my guess is, you're using Dimensional funds, if not exclusively, pretty close to exclusively. Because you just believe in the strategy, and it's not like I'm going to make this 5% of my portfolio, I'm going to use it as my core strategy. If you're going to do it, you need to understand the details, and then you need to just carry it out with confidence. Because otherwise, you as an advisor end up being in the performance chasing category here where you say, hasn't worked for five years, I'm switching gears. That doesn't help anybody.
Ben Felix: I agree with all that. Should we move on to the After Show?
Dan Bortolotti: Yes, let's do it.
Ben Felix: So, we've got a quick cancer update. I went for CT scans, they injected iodine into my blood, I guess, so they could see tumours better, but they were all clear, which was great. I just got that news last Thursday, feels like I got the news a long time ago. I don't know. It feels like my whole life changed, that I felt just a weight off my shoulders, but only a week ago that I found that out. So, that was good news. So, basically, like the surgery got the cancer that was in there out and there was no sign of spread when they did the surgery. Then, these CT scans have confirmed that there is no spread as of now.
Dan Bortolotti: That's fantastic news. I think I can speak for everybody in the audience when I say that that's excellent news. So, I know from talking to you before, it was like the uncertainty is the hardest part to deal with, right? And now, yes, you got some news and it's about as good as it could have been. So, that's excellent.
Ben Felix: It kind of felt like everything was on pause until I knew what was going on there. Definitely a weight off my shoulders. There is still the cycle now of blood work every three months, CT scan every six months for the next year, because there is still a 15% chance of recurrence, based on the type of cancer and stuff like that. If that does happen, then I would still need chemotherapy, which would be highly effective. They order it this way. I could have elected to do chemo, but they recommend, they call it active surveillance, because if it does recur, chemo is still just as effective later as it would be now. So, it's like, I've got this 15% chance of recurrence for the next five years. But if it does recur within that window, I can do chemotherapy and it would It'll be just as effective as if I did chemotherapy now.
Dan Bortolotti: So, very little or no benefit to doing it proactively.
Ben Felix: Exactly.
Dan Bortolotti: Well, that's not something anybody wants to go through unless they have to. know, it's dreadful. That sounds great.
Ben Felix: They give the option because I guess some people want to just be done with it. They also explain that some people for whatever reason are not able to do active surveillance, because they live far away from the medical center, for example. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing active surveillance, keep an eye on it for the next five years. And then, after that, I'm considered a regular person again.
Dan Bortolotti: Excellent.
Ben Felix: I did want to touch base, Dan, it's been six months. We talked about this briefly in the intro, six months since you started co-hosting the podcast. What do you think? Are you enjoying it? What are your thoughts?
Dan Bortolotti: It is really great to be back behind the mic and to be able to speak to a much wider group of investors than I'm able to do on my own. I still communicate with investors when I hear from them directly, but obviously, the numbers have slowed down, as I have not been creating any content the way I used to. Your listeners will know. I mean, I had my own podcast there, the Canadian Coach Potato podcast for, geez, I can't even remember how many years. It wasn't very long. I did about 24, 25 episodes. This was going back 2015, I think we launched, which, you know, 10 years ago, the podcast universe was a lot smaller than it is today. It was great. I loved doing it, but it was just an extraordinary amount of work. When I started doing it, it was, I don't want to say, totally a one-man team, but it was close, and that I took a different approach than you do. Like, I wrote the scripts word for word. So, I was booking interview guests myself. I was writing all of it. I was recording it myself, sending the files off to a producer who edited, and added the music, and that. But to produce a 45-minute podcast probably took me 10, 12 hours. And I was doing it on the weekends because I just don't have time to do that during the workday, and it was taking its toll for sure. It got to the point where, even though I loved doing it, and I think it had a pretty loyal audience, it was not practical for me to continue. I remember, when you and I talked about this, we were at a dinner and you'd basically said, "Look, if you could do it without all of that prep work, are you still interested in the idea?" And I said, "Absolutely," and here we are. It's such a tight ship here. I mean, it's such a great team in front of the mic and behind the scenes. So much amazing research and prep that goes into it. It makes my job relatively easy. My role, you know, I feel it's, share my experience, share my whatever wisdom I may have gained in the trenches over the years. And I really enjoy it. Now, listeners feel I'm adding something to it as well.
Ben Felix: You definitely are. I've loved having you on, and we hear from listeners. I know you don't go on social media as much, but we definitely hear a lot from listeners that you've been a great addition.
Dan Bortolotti: Excellent. Thank you.
Ben Felix: Yeah, it's good. Should we do some reviews?
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah.
Ben Felix: I'll start. "Best finance podcast, super interesting and informative. This podcast as well as Ben's YouTube channel led me to question the financial advice, I've been getting for most of my adult life. Became a PWL client last year, and I couldn't be happier. Keep up the good work." By B. Smith from Canada. Very nice.
Dan Bortolotti: All right. Here's another one. Titled. "Great way to learn, been a regular listener to every episode for the past two years, and AMA number four was my absolute favorite. I'm getting close to retiring and I love the discussions on factor investing in sequence of return risks. Thanks for your expertise and entertaining discussions." From Cordinera in the United States of America.
Ben Felix: Nice one. "Fantastic. I mean it." That's good, I'm glad they actually meant it. "I cannot recommend this podcast enough to anyone interested in seeing how the sausage is made in practical terms, having listened to every episode at least twice over the last few years." Wow.
Dan Bortolotti: That's a lot of listening.
Ben Felix: "It's given me the confidence to save, invest for retirement, and get my financial house in order, and keep it way. Probably the most impactful thing from these episodes was the understanding and confidence of how employer matching/fund selection can impact employee retirement. Based on the education provided within, I approached my company HR about our 401(k) funds to have access to better options. In an interesting turn of events, I'm now on the 401(k) committee and we've recently gotten lower cost index and target date funds approved for everyone in the company. You have literally at thousands of people in a positive manner, and I can't thank you enough for the work that you do." That's from Mike from the United States. That's pretty cool.
Dan Bortolotti: That's an amazing story, because, you know, I've heard this a lot. People will say, "Talk to your HR department and see if you can get them," and I'm thinking, "That's never going to work." I don't know what kind of an audience you're going to get with the people who make these decisions, and you could make some argument that isn't really going to resonate with them. This is fantastic, a real example of someone who actually did it successfully.
Ben Felix: Got on the committee. Good for Mike. Credit goes to Mike for pulling that off. Not just us.
Dan Bortolotti: I'm going to start giving that advice again. I stopped doing it because I thought it was futile, but apparently not. That's excellent. All right. Our last one here, it says, “Top-tier podcast. Excellent discussions on financial topics with sometimes too much research and evidence to back it up.” Fair enough. “Love nerding out over super niche topics and getting into the nitty-gritty details. The AMAs are a good opportunity for you all to dive into more regular, everyday people issues, which is a good break from some of the super specific topics that are only applicable to high-income individuals or corporations. Been listening for around a year and trying to catch up on the backlog. Keep them coming.” From RD 2001 in Canada.
Ben Felix: Very nice.
Dan Bortolotti: Good feedback.
Ben Felix: Yes, good feedback. We always appreciate the reviews. I think last time we recorded we didn't have any maybe. And so, I said, "Hey, why don't you leave a review if you haven't yet" Then, we got all these new ones.
Dan Bortolotti: Excellent.
RRP 351 Transcript
Ben Felix: Hopefully we have some more next time. All right, anything else?
Dan Bortolotti: No, I think we're good.
Ben Felix: All right. Thanks, Dan, and thanks everyone for listening.
Dan Bortolotti: Thanks. See you next time.
Is there an error in the transcript? Let us know! Email us at info@rationalreminder.ca.
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Participate in our Community Discussion about this Episode:
https://community.rationalreminder.ca/t/episode-351-dfa-vs-vanguard/36182
Books From Today’s Episode:
The Incredible Shrinking Alpha — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0857198246
Papers From Today’s Episode:
‘The relationship between return and market value of common stocks’ —https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-405X(81)90018-0
‘Market Efficiency’ — https://www.jstor.org/stable/246460
‘The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns’ — https://doi.org/10.2307/2329112
‘A Five-Factor Asset Pricing Model’ — https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2287202
‘The Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period 1945-1964’ —https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.244153
‘The Death of Diversification Has Been Greatly Exaggerated’ — https://ssrn.com/abstract=2998754
Links From Today’s Episode:
Rational Reminder on iTunes — https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-reminder-podcast/id1426530582
Rational Reminder on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/rationalreminder/
Rational Reminder on X — https://x.com/RationalRemind
Rational Reminder on TikTok — www.tiktok.com/@rationalreminder
Rational Reminder on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/
Benjamin Felix — https://pwlcapital.com/our-team/
Benjamin on X — https://x.com/benjaminwfelix
Benjamin on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminwfelix/
Dan Bortolotti on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-bortolotti-8a482310/
Canadian Couch Potato — https://canadiancouchpotato.com/
Dimensional — https://www.dimensional.com/
Vanguard — https://investor.vanguard.com/
‘Remembering John “Mac” McQuown, Whose Curiosity Drove a Life of Innovation’ — https://www.dimensional.com/dk-en/insights/remembering-john-mac-mcquown-whose-curiosity-drove-a-life-of-innovation
‘Episode 182: John “Mac” McQuown: The Data Will Sort That Out’ — https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/182
‘Episode 131: David Booth: The First Index Fund, Competing Fiercely, and Keeping it Simple’ —https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/131
‘Episode 316 - Andrew Chen: "Is everything I was taught about cross-sectional asset pricing wrong?!"’ — https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/316