Always Ready to Go

I grew up on Long Island, and when you're born, the first thing the doctor does is hand you a lacrosse stick. My senior year of high school ranked the number two team in the nation. In fact, I still have a box at home of letters being recruited to play lacrosse in college on scholarship. I had enlisted in the Marine Corps my junior year of high school. I had known from a very early age that I wanted to be a Marine. I had to go to my parents and sort of convince them that this was gonna be the best thing for me. At the time, I don't think anyone actually thought it was the best thing for me, knowing that I had this opportunity to go to college and play lacrosse, and it really wasn't a conflict because I knew exactly what it is that I wanted to do. The Marines, it's a very team-based approach and it's a very systematic process. One of the things that my unit specialized in was going into war-torn countries and evacuating non-combatants. As a country, we have civilians all throughout the world for many different reasons. We were specialized in this training to go into that situation and evacuate American citizens. We were able to be very successful because it didn't matter that we deployed within a six hour notice. The Marines are ready to go. At Dimensional, I'm the co-head of product specialists and I lead the fixed income portfolio investment strategist team. We're subject matter experts in both fixed income markets and also Dimensional portfolios. When you're a leader, as you start to think about risk. In terms of risk for Marines, that could be lots of different things. And you want to make sure that you're training those Marines to be able to minimize risk, and that means that they're prepared. I think in terms of the investment world, many ways that you can control risk are be diversified, invest in markets that are large in liquid. Because we are a systematic manager, you can have an expectation in terms of how we're gonna manage portfolios in different environments. Whether yield curves have different shapes, credit spreads have different magnitudes, you will know based on markets how we are gonna position portfolios. And I think this brings a lot of transparency to both the team members at Dimensional and then also to investors where they're not gonna wake up surprised and say, well, why is my portfolio positioned like this based on what the market is telling me? And that provides a much better investment experience where you can understand what's going on in your portfolio by being able to understand what's happening in markets. We have a philosophy and having the discipline to stick to that philosophy, that is something that I learned in the military. But you have to have discipline and training, and you have to know exactly how to react systematically to be successful.