Elroy Dimson

There have been one or two, and I could give you anecdotes along those lines.

We make sure that we include everything.

And so our history is now cover significantly over 98% of the market capitalization of global equity markets in 1900.

And they're equally comprehensive today.

So missing countries is not a problem.

What is important is how you do the calculations.

So if a market

loses some of its assets.

For example, Austria lost the Hungarian assets, but the Austrian market continued.

We want to make sure that we're using the right index and reflecting what went wrong.

If we're looking at the world index, we need to include the Russian or the Chinese stocks that became valueless in just the same way as if you were looking at a conventional single country index.

you take in those companies which became valueless, and they're part of the index calculation.

The same is true for the global series.

Well, the back histories I think are tricky.

And if you look at the early attempts at back histories, which were typically done by general business economists or economic historians, they were perhaps less critical

of the data that they were using.

Nowadays, financial history is a big thing.

People are much more aware of the dangers of finding ways of losing data and inadvertently having misleading results in the index history.

Well, let's go back to the book that we were talking about.

We call it Triumph of the Optimists.