Benjamin Felix

Shelley is the Chief Economist at the Investment Company Institute.

or ICI.

So ICI is a trade association representing the asset management industry and the individual investors that they serve.

And as a group, they advocate for policies that strengthen capital markets and democratize access to them for the benefit of long-term individual investors saving for retirement and other financial goals.

They do a ton of research, which Shelley leads that team on the structure and trends of the ETF mutual fund industries on financial markets in the US and around the world.

And Shelley contributes to analysis on financial systemic risks and conducts economic analysis on the impacts of proposed laws and regulations governing funds.

She's been with ICI since 2005, serving as senior economist, senior director of industry and financial analysis, and deputy chief economist.

And prior to that, she spent 13 years as a staff economist and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board.

And Shelley's got a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I don't know if listeners will be familiar with this or not, but they should be, and we'll put a link to it in the description.

ICI produces this massive document every year called the Investment Company Factbook.

It is the most comprehensive overview of the global fund industry, drills down deepest on the US market.

which is their focus, but it's got data for fund markets all around the world.

So it looks at things like the split between active and passive, the split between ETFs and mutual funds, the changes in those things over time, lots of other really interesting stuff.

So I've pulled data from that report for lots of my videos, and we mostly talked about things that are in that report with Shelley.

Some pretty crazy data points on like how much of the global capital market is held in funds.

Mind-blowing.

It's fascinating stuff.

And then, yeah, Dan, like you said, explanations for why it's like, here's the data.

Look how much of this thing has changed over time.