Elroy Dimson

And then as soon as there is an industry sector for road transport, which is not as early as 1900, but as soon as that's available, we take that sector index and we start it at the same level on the start date as railways had.

And we do the same thing once there's a listed sector on the stock market for airplanes.

So we can have a number of series.

And what you find is railways did much better than the alternatives, even though nowadays nobody would think of railway stocks as a growth stock in any sense.

It's fun.

We periodically update that work.

Typically what happens when we write these books is we produce an essay or two of particular topics.

Some of those you have acquired because they found their way onto the Internet.

But we also bring in the long-lived pieces of research.

And so the book will increasingly grow.

to having more and more topics.

We never realized that if we have this long-term history where we could simply ask the history, what was the equity risk premium?

But instead, we could look at all sorts of other questions over time.

It's the richness of that data, data which we license you to use in your own research as well.

it can answer a whole variety of different questions, whether you are focused on inflation, emerging markets, and sometimes more esoteric investments, precious metals, artworks, and so forth.

Yes, the story has remained the same.

You know, when you see these graphs of different asset classes or indices moving up over time, so we've got a horizontal axis, which is

for the years, and the vertical axis is a value, but that vertical axis is always plotted in a logarithmic form.

So if you move one inch up the vertical axis on a page,

And let's suppose that over that inch on the page, you've got values going up tenfold.