Frederick Vettese

Well, David, thank you.

Thank you very much for the kind words.

I'm glad to finally be able to come on your show.

That's actually interesting.

I'll tell you this.

So I started doing my charts for the Global Mail about three and a half years ago.

So what I did was I proposed to them that, you know, I do charts all the time in my writing, so why don't I just do a chart for you once a week?

It turned out I couldn't actually do it once a week.

It was a bit too much to keep up, so I started doing it once every couple of weeks.

But initially, it was low-hanging fruit.

There were all kinds of charts that I just had to produce, like, for example, how the average retirement age in Canada is changing over time, what the kind of returns people can really expect based on their acidness and their risk tolerance, that kind of stuff.

I did the low-hanging fruit first, and after a while, I kind of was more of a struggle to come up with ideas.

And usually, it's just a matter of getting an insight.

And I might be doing anything like, you know, practicing my putting or talking to my wife or watching golf on television.

And all of a sudden, there's something I'm thinking about where I would like to have the answer myself.

And I kind of think I know what the answer is, but I can't quantify it.

And I thought it would be kind of neat to actually be able to do the research and actually get it done.

And because I have this ongoing pressure of having to meet a deadline with the Globe and Mail, I'll do that research every couple of weeks and produce that.

Having said that, what's interesting is I never know which ones are going to be successful.

Sometimes you think you have a killer chart and it stays on the Globe and Mail homepage for like an hour.