Benjamin Felix

Let’s talk about the S&P 500 Index, one of the oldest and most familiar stock indexes in the world. According to the S&P Dow Jones Indices website, the S&P 500 tracks 500 U.S. stocks that cover roughly 80% of available U.S. market capitalization.

As the founder and CIO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, host of the Masters in Business Podcast and regular financial blogger for more than 15 years, Barry Ritholtz is someone we have been dying to speak to on the show and who we have taken loads of inspiration from over the years.

In investing and in life, we know we can’t always control the outcomes that occur from the decisions we make. Bad things can happen to the wisest among us. Likewise, even a fool can get lucky.

Joining us on the podcast today is Jonathan Clements, former Wall Street Journal columnist, founder of HumbleDollar and author of From Here to Financial Happiness, How to Think About Money and several other books. Jonathan is a well-known name in the world of personal finance as he has been giving financial advice for more than 20 years.

We have joining us Dr. David Blitzer who is the Managing Director and Chairman of the S&P Dow Jones index committee. He has been there from the time when indexes were barely even being traded and the first time S&P Futures began trading, and since then, indexing has turned into the massive phenomenon we all know today.

Live in the studio with us today is Preet Banerjee, renowned speaker, personal finance expert, consultant and author of Stop Overthinking Your Money.

If you’ve got a fair amount of common sense – and you must, if you’re following my Common Sense Investing series – you probably already know that perfection is hard to find. In other words, in the search for solid answers to life’s greatest questions, you’ll usually find a lot more shades of gray, than pure-black or all-white.

Today we’re diving into the recent CPPIB report that portrays actively managed funds in the most optimistic light. But before you trade in your index funds, we look at the methodologies and calculations employed by the report and show why there are a number of issues with their findings.

In many walks of life, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. What about in your portfolio? Every so often, I hear someone argue that investing in index funds can leave you over-diversified. The logic goes something like this: Instead of buying all of the companies in an index, you could buy a subset of only the “good” ones, to potentially outperform the index as a whole.

Andrew Hallam wrote a post in 2018 assessing the performance of Dimensional Fund Advisors funds against what he proposed as comparable Vanguard funds. Hallam is not the first person to attempt this analysis.