The 50-Year Battle for a Better Way to Invest
Mac McQuown recruited me to help create the very first indexed portfolio in 1971. I was 24 years old and living in San Francisco, where more people my age were following the Grateful Dead than the stock market. The think tank Mac set up felt like a start-up, although it was long before anyone used that term. We were excited by the opportunity to turn academic research into a new way of investing. Many people thought we would fail. Some even called what we were trying to do “un-American.”
But we didn’t worry about the attacks; we focused on how indexing could improve the lives of investors. The fund offerings available at the time were actively managed portfolios that tried to outguess the market and were expensive, lacked diversification, and performed poorly. So-called star managers sold investors on their ability to win against the market; they sold products as opposed to solutions. Problem was, there was no compelling evidence they could reliably beat the market. We were confident that indexing—a highly diversified, low-cost investment solution that relied not on a manager’s ability to pick winners but on the human ingenuity of hundreds or thousands of companies—would change lives for the better.
Fifty years later, $9.1 trillion is invested in index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).1 This represents 51% of the total $17.9 trillion in equity ETFs and mutual funds. Six of the original academic consultants Mac hired to work on that first index fund went on to win Nobel Prizes. I have worked with four of them at Dimensional.
Click here to read on
Robert J. Pyle, CFP®, CFA is president of Diversified Asset Management, Inc. (DAMI). DAMI is registered as an investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) with its primary place of business in the state of Colorado. DAMI will only transact business in other states to the extent DAMI has made the requisite notice filings or obtained the necessary licensing in such state. No follow up or individualized responses to persons in other jurisdictions that involve either rendering or attempting to render personalized investment advice for compensation will be made absent compliance with applicable legal requirements, or an applicable exemption or exclusion. References to registration with the SEC do not imply any endorsement or approval of the qualifications of the firm, nor do they imply that the firm’s representatives have attained a particular level of skill or training. To contact Robert, call 303-440-2906 or e-mail info@diversifiedassetmanagement.com.
The views, opinion, information and content provided here are solely those of the respective authors, and may not represent the views or opinions of Diversified Asset Management, Inc. The selection of any posts or articles should not be regarded as an explicit or implicit endorsement or recommendation of any such posts or articles, or services provided or referenced and statements made by the authors of such posts or articles. Diversified Asset Management, Inc. cannot guarantee the accuracy or currency of any such third party information or content, and does not undertake to verify or update such information or content. Any such information or other content should not be construed as investment, legal, accounting or tax advice.