Elroy Dimson

What do people say to you?

That must be something which you talk about.

It is much, much cheaper to invest globally than it was.

It may be less important, but it can also be a great deal less costly.

The burden in terms of costs for investing in a passive global fund is remarkably low.

The burden, therefore, for active investors to compete with that is really difficult.

It's kind of curious that because when Dimensional was quite young in the London market,

They supported us collecting value and size data.

Value data had previously not existed.

I coordinated several PhD students to do that.

The work largely was done by year one, year two, year three PhDs collecting data manually and coordinated by a year zero PhD.

You might ask, what is a year zero PhD?

It's somebody who we have given a place on the PhD program, and he just seemed very well organized.

This is a man who subsequently became editor of Journal of Finance, so he was my PhD student.

We ended up collecting data, publishing this in Financial Analysts Journal.

I think it probably could be published somewhere better, but we were in a hurry to get that out.

That was the first attempt at a time when I think in the early years, Dimensional was much more keen on factor effects within the US and thinking globally.

That was still to come.

But the paper on value and growth in the UK was complementary to other stuff.

We've looked at performances.