Elroy Dimson

Thank you for having me.

It's a very pleasant afternoon here, but other people who are tuning in will be all over the world.

Weather may be different where you are.

Well, I hope it's exciting for everyone.

It's extremely difficult to think about the future without knowing where you've come from.

It's an integral part of a journey.

If you don't know where the journey started, you can't start thinking about where you're going to end up.

That's an interesting story because when Paul Marshall, Mike Staunton and I, we all did our PhDs at London Business School.

Early on in our academic lives, textbooks all made very heavy use of American data and a little bit of British and a tiny bit of Canadian data.

But basically, if you had what then was a standard textbook of Bailey and Myers, which now has another couple of co-authors,

you would see some indications to what returns you might expect, but there was very little choice other than to recite what had happened in the United States.

And so there was heavy reliance on the long-term data which had come out of the University of Chicago.

Paul Marsh and I had done a bit on looking at the long-term for the UK, and there'd been one or two snippets of not very satisfactory research on the UK.

But that was about it, and even Canada didn't really play a part.

We, at that time, distributed our research.

We began at the very end of 1999.

We distributed it through a firm which sort of changed hands a bit.

We have not changed sponsors much, except when there's been a corporate event amongst the sponsors.

It became clear there was a demand to go beyond the American and British data that we had.

And we were moving into a period of internationalization.