Institutional Investor’s 2016 Money Masters

The reason we've been successful over time is, we got connected to leading academics, and caught the wave of thinking about, new way of thinking about finance and investing. We were able to take those ideas and implement them very well. If you look at the origin of Dimensional, it really goes back to the academic work in the 1960s and a lot of that was headquartered at The University of Chicago, which is where I went to school and worked with Gene Fama. And, you know Fama, and all these other leading academics at the time came up with significant breakthrough ideas that really hadn't been applied. And so, Dimensional was able to apply some of those ideas. I look at things that I'd like to see happen that we haven't done, I would like to see us figure out how to access the average person. Right now, we do a great job for clients, and we started with just the largest clients, defined benefit plans, originally. And now we've started working with individuals, not directly, but through financial advisors. And it's difficult to access the average person. I think the average account balance and a 401k plan is 60,000 dollars. How do you help people make meaningful decisions with that level of assets? The big question mark is labor input. It's extending personalized things, requires time. Time is money. So, how can you figure out ways of delivering good financial services to the average person? I think is something I would like to see us do better, do a better job at. I think there's less emotion about the active pass debate. I think the big change is peoples initial presumption. The institutional investor 20 years ago just assumed they could find managers that could consistently beat the market. I think increasingly the presumption is, there's a lot of doubt that they can do that. Nevertheless, the managers themselves are undeterred, I mean, they believe they can do it, they believe they can do it. I think it's just a much more difficult sale rate at the moment. My belief is that, if we aren't gonna have progress, particularly in the area of investing in finance, innovation has to come from better and safer, you know, financial services. And that's what we'll, you know, lift up, lift us all up.