Benjamin Felix

This is something that I've wanted to do for, we've been running the podcast for eight years now.

You're someone that I've always wanted to have on.

Super excited that we're talking to you.

That's good.

To start with the first question here, can you talk to us about why it's important to study financial market history when thinking about the future?

When you're assembling the data, like when you say you got to 10 countries and you keep adding countries, what are you actually doing?

Where is the data coming from?

Yeah, it's incredible.

You mentioned excluding income, having just a capital gains index.

Other than that, what are some of the biases and other issues that can affect historical index data?

That was great on survivorship bias.

I'd love you to talk also about easy data bias when it comes to country indices.

That's crazy.

It's a lot of really looking at what actually happened in that country to figure out what should be included in the calculation.

We go from US market data, maybe some UK, upward biased UK market data being the norm, what everybody knew.

How did your work on long-term global returns change our understanding of expected stock and bond returns?

In 1900, the optimists end up triumphing, as the title of your book suggests, thinking about how people feel today about the state of the world.

Do you think people in 1900 thought that stock returns would be as positive as they were in the future?

Absolutely.

It comes up all the time, especially today where the US stock market has obviously had lots of capital appreciation on presumably very, very rosy expectations for the future.