What if we could get two legends in the world of investing together for a discussion on their lives, careers, and the art & science of investing?
This week, we are privileged to have just such a conversation with two legends from the investing world: Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama and Dimensional Funds Advisors (DFA) co-founder David Booth.
After 50+ years of collaboration, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business thought that it might be informative to host a conversation with two of the legends the school produced, about the nature of their relationship, how investing has evolved, and what we can expect from the markets in the future.
They are hosting this event, and we are turning it into a Masters in Business Live, with me as the host.
Gene Fama is of course best known for the efficient-market hypothesis, his research on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the Fama-French factor models. He was the recipient of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2013 (with Robert Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen) for his work showing that “stock price movements are impossible to predict in the short-term and that new information affects prices almost immediately, which means that the market is efficient.”
David G. Booth co-founded Dimensional Funds Advisors with another University of Chicago alum Rex Sinquefield in 1981. The firm employs 1400 people who help it to manage 579 billion dollars. From1999 to 2018, only 17% of equity and fixed income funds outperformed their respective benchmarks 20 years later. Over the same period, 85% of Dimensional’s equity and fixed income funds beat their benchmarks.
Over the course of our hour plus conversation, we will cover three broad topics: 1) Eugene Fama’s ground-breaking research; 2) the 50+ year relationship between Fama and Booth; and, 3) how DFA has applied academic theories in the real world of investing capital.
Efficient markets, bubbles, the new factor zoo (there are now estimated to be as many as 700 newly discovered factors – are any of them worthwhile?) and whether “Beta is dead” will all be fair game for the discussion.
Readers can not only watch the event live, but can submit questions: Please email your best queries to BRitholtz3@Bloomberg.net before midnight tonight. The full interview will be streamed live on Twitter Facebook and TicTok tomorrow at 1pm Eastern time; the video will be broadcast later this week. And the full MIB audio only podcast will be released this coming weekend.
