Elroy Dimson

We presented our data.

I can tell you a bit about our very detailed data in a moment.

Once we'd got that first book done, there was so much interest in it.

We were presenting it all over the place to academics and practitioners.

And every so often, we'd be in a large room.

Question time comes along and somebody would say, you know, I've been collecting data like this for my country.

It never occurred to me that anybody would be interested.

And so we grabbed.

By the time we had our first 10 countries, we had accumulated some long-term return series, but that rapidly went up after that.

We used data which has often been assembled by other people in more recent decades commercially before that academics who are doing this job.

They've been kind to us and we've been kind to them.

We credit their work in great detail.

And often we were able to extend it a bit.

So, for example, for South Africa, there was somebody who had done a study like the famous Ibbotson-Sinkfield long-term return studies for South Africa.

It was starting in 1940.

But before 1940, South African shares were traded heavily as well in London.

And so it was possible to use data to infill missing data.

And so we've worked in a number of cases with people from other countries to extend the data sets and produce a series

which starts at a common date, so primary start date is a new year, 1900.

It's drawing on contributions from scores of academics and scores of commercial data sets.