Looking to Data for Life’s Most Important Choices

My parents are Egyptian, and I was born in Egypt, but I grew up in Denmark. My father, he's an agricultural engineer and he was looking for work. He looked up, in an encyclopedia, the countries in the world with the most agricultural hectare space per capita, and Denmark was very close to the top, and so he just sent a whole bunch of job applications and ended up getting a job in Denmark. And a few years later, that's when my mom and I joined him. This idea that if there is something you want to do, if you want to broaden your horizons, if there's, if there's a goal, then plan it out. Figure out how do I get from A to B in the most efficient way and then execute on it. That really stuck with me and so I started a PhD in finance and started thinking very seriously about research and conducting research, and I always had this voice at the back of my head saying, wow, it could be nice to try and apply this. It could be nice to see this have an impact in the real world and not just in papers that we write, and I don't think there's a better place than Dimensional for that. One important thing that that characterizes the research that we do here at Dimensional is that we are unapologetic about just how high a hurdle we set for research to be deemed rigorous and robust. You go through this process of identifying this is a good idea for investments, it's backed out by science, it's backed out by data, but also by theory. Then you figure out next part of the plan, how do I bring this to a real world portfolio? Then you figure out, how do I keep this portfolio exactly positioned like it should be? Then how do I make sure that every single day I'm doing all I can to enhance its value and bring the most. It's very methodical, very planned out, process based. That was super appealing to me before, and it still is today. Whenever you have a goal in mind and that goal will influence not just your life but other people's lives, there's naturally high stakes. That was true when my father was researching in that encyclopedia about where to move his family. But it's also true whenever we are doing research here at the firm and whenever we introduce something new. This is people's money. This is people's lives. It's people's retirement. We have to set much higher standards.