Tanya Class One- Title Page

Well, we've had a lot of emails and phone calls. They're coming from everywhere. When are we going to get to the best in class ETF recommendations? Well, we're here. And Chris Pederson is back from his trips around the world. Now Chris, it's great as a retired guy that you don't spend all your time on this project. My wife wants to talk to your wife and find out how she did that. But it's largely just me. I have a lot of things in the world I want to do. So by the way, we've never gone all the way around the world. We always go out and back. So that's an adventure still out there for the future. Well, can you just give a 30 second overview of this last trip? Oh, it was awesome. My brother-in-law had in his younger days, he had served a mission for our church in New Zealand. And he'd never been back. And we've been in New Zealand multiple times in our lives. And we really wanted to take him back. And so my sister, my brother-in-law, and us, we did a trip down to New Zealand. And he got to reconnect with people he hadn't seen in 40 years. And just relish the beauty and the people and the culture. And then we went over to Australia and did a driving trip to. We just love all the wildlife down there. And we got to see all the critters. And the locals think we're silly. It's like, you know, we get excited about seeing a kangaroo. It's like seeing a deer in the United States. But to us, it's exotic and fun. So yeah, it was loads of fun. That's wonderful. Well, we're glad you're back. And we really are here to talk about one of the most important decisions that I think you're going to have to make. And I know that we are making. And we want to make sure that you understand not everything because we could be here for hours. But enough of it, that you will believe that we're recommending something that is truly good for the long term. I've been talking gently about this. We haven't dug into the numbers like we will today. But I know my days are numbered. Everybody's days are numbered. And the question is, how do we leave the information to do it yourself, investors, that they might be able to invest for the next 50 years and have a sense that while it isn't going to make them the most money because we know there's going to be another nevilleia or another Facebook, whatever it might be over the next 50 years. And you're probably not going to go invest a lot of money in that, but we'll know about it. And we will know just like I know that in the early days of Microsoft living here in the Pacific Northwest, it would have been easy to put a few thousand dollars into the original underwriting or shortly after it came to the public. And it would have been a financial life changer. I might have been able to retire a year earlier, who knows, but the bottom line is we're looking for a strategy that we think would be very similar to somebody who in 1976 decided that they were going to put their retirement into the S&P 500. I'm these passed away in the last few years, but I know somebody who did that. So when I look at a long-term chart starting in 1976, I know that every person who invested at that time and held during that time in essence had the same return. And that's exciting to me because I think if you were able to do that, then most of us should be able to meet our long-term needs. But I'm not suggesting we put all of our money in the S&P 500 forever, but I'm just saying that in the equity part of our portfolio, regardless of how aggressive you want to be with that, that that would have been and should probably continue to be an effective thing to do. Well, you know we want more. And it isn't that we want more because we have a sense of that you are greedy or that we are thinking greed, but more importantly, we are thinking that all of us may have plans, but we also know that most of those plans, things happen and we for some reason don't get where we thought we were going to go. So if we try to maybe get a little more, maybe what we'll end up with is what we would have gotten from 1976 to now in the S&P 500 because things didn't go quite right for you or for the market or whatever. So we know that if we're not going to be around here to continue to be monitoring the ETFs and figuring out best in class, maybe there is another way to have what we will, I guess would think of as best in class over the long term. And that means more than just an investment on any ETF, there were a mutual fund, but rather a way to package your portfolio that gives you access to what we think will be some of the finest performing mutual funds or ETFs in the long run. And of course, I've talked enough about it recently that you know I'm talking about a Vontus and dimensional funds and we're going to show you some numbers and discuss the new recommendations. And Chris, why don't you share your thoughts on making this move? I don't think of it as radical except for maybe people who have already accumulated some big tax impact in the taxable part of their portfolio. We can certainly address that, but go ahead and share your thoughts because when I came to you with this idea, as you worked so hard on these best in class, I thought this seems unfair to you and I wasn't sure you were going to decide and we're partners and derls of partner and so I've tried to, I've listened to you and your feelings, but why don't you share them since you've been responsible for the best in class ETFs? Sure. The first thoughts that went through my mind were boy, people are going to miss the analysis that we've done in the past and that's a lot of work savings. This sounds like a good deal. But then as I thought about it longer, I recognized that over time two really interesting things have happened. One is that the breadth of offering of funds at a Vontus has expanded a lot compared to when we first started this process and another one related to that is that ETFs from DFA weren't available when we started this process. We've gone from a world where it really was necessary to tap all kinds of different fund families to build a good ETF portfolio that did what we wanted to where there are these two companies that offer a broad offering that addresses pretty much all of our needs. The other thing that has happened is as we've done the analysis over the years and these new families have become available, the amount of variation in the fund choices has declined. We've gotten to where it's almost all of Vontus anyway. It was a Vontus plus DFA and the differences between the funds are pretty small. I think it's really important for people to know in this boot camp video about fund choice that the number one choice you make is to save. The number two choice you make is probably stocks versus bonds to take on enough risk early in life that your money can work for you and you have an engine. The number three choices are you going to tell to away from the market, whether you actually do invest differently for the market for a different kind of return to tolerate a different ride and hopefully do better. That's a very important choice. The choice after that of which funds you use to implement that strategy provided you pick among low-cost good index funds. isn't nearly as important as the other choices you've made leading up to that. And so recommending families of funds, which is what we're leaning to now, what we're going to show you, I think fits very well with those new realities. And so it wasn't hard to get on board with this change. I'm sure there will still be people including you, Paul. You've asked me once in the last month to do my old analysis comparing to funds. There will be people who ask for it. And on occasion we may do it. But I feel very good about this choice because I think that people can choose between the avantus and the DFA funds or even choose to mix them and end up in a really, really great place. And one that they won't have to change frequently or second guess or, you know, wait anxiously for new releases of information. Hopefully it will be a lot more stable. And I appreciate those comments, Chris. And the other kind of major thing that's going on here is we will continue while we're recommending these DFA and the avantus funds. We're going to continue to offer some DFA Vanguard ETFs for people who are married to Vanguard. And I will tell you, I'm just set to speak at the Boglehead's conference here, I think in November. And I have a sense of guilt. The only thing I can say is the ETFs that we think most highly of are all available through Vanguard if people want to continue their relationship with Vanguard. And by the way, I'm sure we're not talking about fixed income here today. We will another time. But I am sure there are people who are going to want to place their fixed income money in a Vanguard fund. We'll talk and see how you feel about that. But the bottom line is that we are really hoping to give you enough to give you the confidence of putting money into DFA or avantus. It's not so dissimilar in my mind as to when people will come to me and say, "Paul, I've got all my money with an advisor and I'm paying them 1%. And I really don't want to, but I'm not sure. I want to do what you're recommending. I don't know whether I could do it emotionally." And so I will say, "Why don't you just take a portion of your portfolio? If you've got a million dollars, take 100,000 or 200,000. And see if you can set up these kinds of portfolios, the right amount of fixed income, the right amount of equity, and manage that amount. And if that's too much, do it with 50,000. But it's easy in essence to practice without taking huge risk. But I think once that you dig into the difference, because remember, when John Bolgo was building his S&P 500 fund, and I think he would have been happy if that was the only index fund they offered, because he believed so strongly in it. These other ways of addressing investing by the academic community, they weren't even on the table. Just like there was not an IRA, not a Roth IRA, not all the things that are here today to help us. But they are now here. And so we want to make sure that we do our best to help you get an idea. And I think Chris, it would be great if you would take a couple minutes and talk about the difference between the traditional index fund, like a Vanguard index fund, and a non-traditional, because that's what it means. We're going to step from the traditional to the non-traditional. It's a really important distinction. And you'll hear people sometimes use the words passive and active in fuzzy ways too. So I'll bring that back into this too. Some people would even call a Vontisan DFA active funds, just because they are non-traditional index funds. But I think that confuses things. Because to me, the attributes of active that are hurtful to investors are when there's a lot of judgment or guessing and trying to time the market that goes on. That tends to raise the expense ratio. It makes them expensive. And it historically has not shown a benefit in terms of return after expenses. Sometimes it might keep up with expenses, but it usually adds volatility. So it's just not that type of active funds are not worth pursuing for most investors. The traditional versus non-traditional, now that we've kind of agreed that all three of these Vontisan DFA and Vanguard are systematically managed and managed in a way that really doesn't have a lot of judgment or second guessing going on behind the curtain. The difference is really whether the index or the methodology that they follow is public or not. So a traditional index fund, like the Vanguard funds, will follow an index that you can go and look at independently. And you can find out, for example, that the S&P 500 index, that's an example of a public index, is going to change its holdings on a particular date. And you can find out what those holding changes will be. And then you can look at a fund and you can know when they're going to reconstitute and have to do trades to get out of the old holdings and get into the new holdings. And that transparency is a plus, but it's also a minus. So it's nice to know everything that's going on. The problem is that other investors also know. And they can go and make it more expensive for the fund to do those trades by getting in front of them, essentially. And driving up the price of stocks that are going to have to be purchased in large quantity or large number into a traditional index fund. So one of the big advantages that a Vantes and DFA have is that they can create their own index. They can create it based on their own criteria for what's small and what's value. And they can trade with some discretion, not that they're trying to time the market. Usually it's very rules based focused in both of these systems. But for example, they might decide that they're not going to trade out of a stock that has positive momentum that's still going up in value. Even though it's bigger now than it was supposed to be to be in a small fund, they might ride that winning a little bit longer and have a threshold when the when the momentum changes they're going to trade out of it. So that gives them an advantage of being able to take advantage of some additional factors that give them a higher return. But it also prevents other traders from getting in the in front of these trades. And we know from some index analysis that's been done by academics that can cost you a percent or more in the total return of the fund. So the non-traditional index funds I think have a lot of very important advantages provided that they are efficiently run and systematically run with discipline. And one, there's two really good indicators that DFA and Avantas have those attributes. Number one, their expense ratios are fairly low. You're not paying a half a percent or two percent or one percent to get into these funds. They're not charging you enough money to pay a lot of experts behind the scenes to second guess things. So that's indication number one. The other indication, which I think is even more compelling is that when you look at how these funds have performed historically. You can you can trace their performance and to and attribute it to what was going on in the market in terms of what the academics have determined are the drivers of market returns. And there's there's a measure of how good that model is it's called R squared and it tells you basically to within what percentage can you explain history based on what the market was doing. And Avantas and DFA funds are typically 98 99 percent 97 percent describe you can you can describe what they were doing based on what was going on in the market. So there's no room there for somebody behind the screen to be doing something magical because it followed what it was supposed to be doing based on the things you bought it for. You bought it for exposure to size and value and market risk. And you hoped that it also had some momentum and quality risk factor exposure as well. So yeah, that's a very long answer, but I think it's important for people to understand the difference. You know, I was thinking, as you were talking, one of the, you are one of the best teachers that I've ever taken a classroom. That was absolutely great, Chris. So let's just dig a little deeper right now on some history. And by the way, the history from Avadas is short. But the people who run Avadas, they started in 2019. They came from DFA. They are continuing with some changes and they aren't exactly minor changes, but some changes to build portfolios in a very similar fashion. DFA, on the other hand, goes back to the early 90s with some of their funds. I wanted to hear, you'll see on the screen, one of the DFA funds. It's been around since, right at the beginning, not at the beginning, but I think maybe in January of 2000. And it is a small cap value fund. And I love this chart function at the morning star where you can put in the ticker symbol of a fund. And then you can go into the chart function. And within the chart function, you can ask it to show the performance from the end of the first month that was in business. And so you can see here that if in early 2000, you put in $10,000 by the end of that period, and just the 19th of April, you had 165, or let's see what we got here. We got 150,000. That must not be the end. Well, I see 155,824 dollars in 26 cents. Plus the 10,000. So it's 16, or did you say 165? I said 155. I thought you were right. You're right. 165, yeah. Now, what's interesting to me is that it was relatively volatile over that period of time, 26 years. But when it did have a period of decline, it tended to come back fast. And so that is the nature historically of small cap value, down more than the S&P 500 during the decline, but up faster, not guaranteed by the way, but that is at least in most cases, what's happened. Now if we can go into the compare box here where Chris is going to type in the VFINX, the S&P 500 real time returns. Here we have the return over that 26 years of a $10,000 investment, dividends, capital gains, everything reinvested, no taxes. And you're left with about $82,000, versus 165. So when you take out the $10,000 you put in, you have virtually doubled, more than doubled the return over that 26 years. This is why we want particular young people to have some small cap value in their portfolio. So that's one thing we learned from the academics over the long term premium that I think is a royal premium. On the other hand, they said there are other equity asset classes. And so what we're going to look at, or are we going to IWN next? Yes. IWN. IWN is also an index fund, like the DFA fund, except it's a traditional, none of the fancy footwork that the academics have found to be helpful, used just a traditional cap weighted, not taking advantage of factor factors for small cap. You'll notice there you did get a premium over large cap blend, but not a huge premium, instead of $82,000. It's at about $97,000. So way under the 165,000 of the small cap value fund from DFA. And I can tell you as somebody in our investment advisory company, we used the DFA funds for our clients. And they had to pay 1% a year for those services. Now they were more than just getting access to DFA, but that is part of what people wanted. Now we can have access to DFA in an ETF that has been just as productive. And the VODIS, as you'll find out in a few minutes, has even been more productive. So at times, I can't say all the time. But you can tell here now with a traditional kind of the, in fact, that's the Russell 2000 small cap value. There are lots of people that have chosen that for the place to put their small cap value. I would just say they should move part of that or all of that into a DFA or an VODIS small cap value from what I know about the past. Next I think we have small cap blend or small cap value. Which one we're going to do? A UAS for DFSTX. Okay. Now we're talking small cap blend, not value, but a combination of growth and value. History has it, academics teach it, that growth way underperforms value for the long term. But rather than having all the money in value, it is not unusual to have part of the money and small cap blend and have access to some growth in the portfolio. There are times it does help. But notice here now, what do you got when you add that? What's the dollar amount is going to be, I think, around nine. Let's see if I can. I think it's this 86,000. So you add the 10. That'd be 96,000. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. What do you think? Almost 97,000. Right. So that is not as good as the small cap value. I don't think here or actually it is. It's about 100, but $100,000 more or so than the IWN. But that is a premium for small cap blend, which is not going to be historically anyhow, as big a premium as small cap value. Then we go to large cap value from DFA. That was 115,342. Yep. So large cap isn't supposed to make as much as small and values supposed to do better than growth. So it doesn't surprise us that the small cap value, I'm sorry, large cap value got a considerable premium over the S&P 500. So if somebody is really conservative, I would sure not be uncomfortable if they find comfort with the S&P 500 to think that they could create a two funds for life if they wanted to adding a large cap value to the portfolio. But you can see it's not likely to be as profitable as adding small cap value. And I think we have one more or not, Chris. Yeah. You had DISVX, you wanted to compare. DIS? Oh, yes. That is international small cap. International, right. Of course. Of course. You know, it's not easy getting old, Chris. I know. You know, we're there with you. So yes, small cap international value. How did that do? And that turned out to be 135,000, almost 136. Again, a premium. And so this is why the academics will tell us that it's the asset class. That's what drives the return. Theoretically. whether you have active management or passive management, it's still going to be the asset class. What we don't believe is that the active manager is going to make as much money as the passive manager in that asset class. So what do you got next on the list that we wanted to be sure? Any things that you want to give them guidance on in terms of whether to do it, I mentioned taxes a while ago. What beyond taxes would be a consideration? One of the questions that always comes up is should I trade from the old best-in-class recommendations to the new best-in-class recommendations? And every investor has to answer that question for themselves. Their conviction and ability to stay the course with their investments is very important. So first of all, what do you believe you're going to be able to stick with? And then, if it involves a change, is it in a taxable account? And if it's in a taxable account, how long will it take after I pay the taxes for this difference in expected return to pay off? You should think that through, because if it's a really, really minor difference, you're probably better off just sitting where you are as long as you can stick with it. If it's a significant difference, and it's going to pay off in a few years, then you probably want to make it and go with it. If it's a tax-deferred account, the taxes are practically a non-issue. I mean, there's a tiny bit of trading cost perhaps, but you can really move very flexibly in those accounts. And so you have to decide for yourself how big a difference it is. And I think if I were in actively managed funds with 1% expense ratios in a tax-deferred account, it would be a no-brainer. I would move into any of these Vanguard, Avantas, DFA. They'd all be a dramatic improvement. That doesn't mean that you would do better in your one necessarily, but over the long haul, I think, that the expectation and all of the data says that that would be a prudent and wise decision. And so, yeah, that's an important question. Should I move and should, you know, do the taxes matter? And the taxes can matter. Well, and there are other taxes, Chris, that you have in an actively managed portfolio. And that is the income tax. It's not unusual for an actively managed fund to have a 1% higher tax cost. So there are several taxes. And remember what we're hoping is that these are things you're going to be able to do for a lifetime. Yes. And so, in my particular case, at age 82, 10 years may be too long to make up that difference. So that means I'm hoping to live till '92. I'm hoping for much more than that. We're going to keep you in the saddle till 100. You won't like it. My wife won't approve. So let me just, let me just, if I might give you a couple of numbers here in terms of returns. Now, we already looked at the returns of the small cap value versus the S&P 500. But just for the sake of discussion, because I can look at DFA and Avatus, I can look at the average mutual funds to see how they did during the last year. I decided just to look at a year to see what could happen. It was an unusual year. In fact, I didn't even know that if I looked at the 12 months ending April 19th, that these returns would be as high as this. But what I found was that the, if you did a 10-fund portfolio with Avatus, you would have had a 45.5% return for that year. I had no idea. If you had that in DFA, you would have had a 40.7% return. If you had had the average return for those equity asset classes in their categories, according to Morningstar, you would have had a 36.9% compound rate of return. If you had used the Vanguard investments, you would have had a 38.5% compound rate of return. Now, you can do something about this. You can bring this up to a lot more. You can bring it up. Let's see, I guess maybe another 4% possibly by simply using a DFA or a Vanguard ETF for the fund that Vanguard does not offer. That's a huge gain. In fact, that was international. Small cap value is a matter of fact. What I hope you'll do, even if you go Vanguard all the way in the 10-fund strategy, is that you will at least fill in that one fund or asset class if you want to think of it that way, that Vanguard doesn't offer an ETF. Now, I also just for fund took a look at the US-4 fund strategy. Using DFA, it would have been 39.7%. Using Avantus, it would have been 46.3%. Using Fidelity, it would have been 41.9. Using Schwab, it would have been 40.9. Using Vanguard, it would have been 39.6%. And the average in those categories would have been 35.4%. So any of those groups, you would have done fine, but the difference between Vanguard and DFA and Avantus was substantial. And that was, well, I should say, between Vanguard and DFA, it was one 10-to-one%. But Avantus was, it looks like almost 7% higher for that particular year. So I hope that gives you what I'm trying to build in some sense of confidence that this is not a wild and crazy thing that we're asking you to do. Another question that we get, I broke this down here. Actually, I think you wrote this down. Chris, and that is, what about using sustainable, socially responsible ETFs for people who are trying to invest that way? So the big challenge there is the selection of funds. So DFA has three sustainable equity ETFs, a US sustainable core, international sustainable core one, and an emerging market sustainable core one. Avantus has three as well. And since there are essentially large cap funds, it puts you in a position where you either have to give up on the idea of tilting towards small and value and seeking these more meaningfully diversified portfolios, or augmenting those socially responsible funds with others that don't fit under the same umbrella. So because of that, we don't recommend a set of socially responsible funds because we just can't build our portfolios out of them. But if that's really important to you, and it's part of your value set, you can find funds at Vanguard, at DFA, at Avantus, that have those attributes. My expectation would be that you probably give up a little bit in performance in the long run because you're choosing to put your values before the investment metrics or priorities. But a lot of times we pay a price to live our values, and that may be perfectly fine. I have a member of my family who has made that choice for one attribute of their portfolio. And I'm quite confident that for that person in the long run, the satisfaction they get from feeling like they're living their values will be worth the different value. in the money that they end up with. So I think it's a very personal choice. It just doesn't fit our framework in a way that makes it so that we can recommend a portfolio. - Now there are a lot of people who have taken the idea, grabbed onto the idea of a total market index. And we know that that total market index generally doesn't make any more than the S&P 500. They're doing it with Vanguard. In fact, historically it's made less. - Just a little bit. - Just a little bit. - Just a little bit. But have you looked, I haven't, I'm embarrassed to say, but have you looked at how much of those sustainable, socially responsible funds at DFA and the Vantes are actually heavily more heavily weighted to value or maybe have more small cap in the portfolio? - I haven't looked at that because they're kind of outside the range of assets that we recommend. But even if they have some of that tilt, I think now we get into a similar question to people who ask, well, what about using AVGE or DFAW? Or even AVGV, which is a global value fund, right? So all of these are options if you want to simplify, but it's important to know that they're relatively weak sauce compared to the portfolio constructions that we make. So if somebody really just can't handle a for fund solution or a 10 fund solution and the idea of rebalancing every year and they want to go in the direction of using one of these other funds that is tilted a little bit towards value or value and size and is a one fund solution. If they want similar results, they might be able to get there by holding a little bit more equities unless fixed income. So you might decide, well, I'm not, I don't have as strong an engine here. So I'm gonna lighten up on the brakes a little bit. And that is, we just don't have the bandwidth to analyze all of these and tell you exactly what the equivalent solutions are, but that would be a reasonable thing to do and it would get you to a place where you have practically no rebalancing annually. Much like, and we'll talk about this in another bootcamp video, so the two fund for life strategies where we don't rebalance. - Yeah. - Right. - Well, that's great. And what do we do for people who are maybe in vet, well, investing in a 401k or a 403b, and they are unlikely at this point in time to have a VONDIS and DFA available, what should they be doing? - I think they have a range of choices. I think one choice that I would encourage them to think about is augmenting their 401k savings with a brokerage account. Because the, there's a lot to be said about having money in your retirement accounts, certainly don't miss out on the match, contribute as much as it takes to get the full match, but then also having money in a brokerage account, because if you end up retiring early, whether you plan to or not, it's nice to have money that you can access without worrying about penalties and constraints that might apply if it's in a retirement account. I have another family member who recently approached me about that and said, "You know, I've been thinking, "I want to retire early. "I wonder, would it be prudent to have some money "in a brokerage account?" I'm thinking about, you know, it was like, "Wow, I love the way you're thinking here." (laughs) So I think that would be one path. You can also sometimes in a 401k, you can set up a linked brokerage account where you can get access to a wider range of funds. So that may be a possibility. Talk to your HR department about it. And beyond that, you may just be stuck in just making the best choices you can with what you have. And we've hopefully over the years, given you good tools between Morningstar and Portfolio Visualizer to help you make good choices about a low-cost fund that has a good tilt to small in value if that's what you're buying and is not actively managed. And so, yeah, there's a lot of tools out there that hopefully help. - Well, and for people like you say, after they've done their match in the 401k, if the offerings are not gonna let you get at what you need or want, it often makes sense to then go to the Ira, Roth Ira, if you qualify, and use it to access these funds. And then after you have maxed out the Ira, then you can go back if you've got more money to the 401k. So, there are ways to get to it. And also, many plans and the participants don't even know it have the ability, sometimes at any age, more often at age 59 and a half, to be able to transfer their own money that they've put into the 401k out to an Ira. It's called an in-service transfer. And you might check with your folks, with your firm to see if that is offered or read the document. Let's see if there's anything else on our list here. - I think the last question people are gonna have is when will the M1 finance pies and the calculators and all of those things be updated? And the answer is soon, we're working on that. And the calculator is live as of this podcast. So, it's available and the big difference is that I'll reset this back to it's default when you start. Instead of there being a best in class ETF choice down here, now you have just the fund families. So, you can use it the same way you used to, but instead of us just recommending one kind of Hodgepodge collection of what we thought were the best funds in every category, and dependent on family, you can look at the families and you can compare them. And we are recommending a Vantes and DFA as best in class families. If you select the families before you pick a portfolio, you can see how all of the portfolios look on this kind of style chart where we've got value on the left and growth on the right, small on the bottom and large on the top. And you can compare the families. So, a Vantes sits kind of through the middle on a diagonal. If I click DFA, you can see that it shifts up. So, DFA's funds are a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger than the Avanters funds. And if I go to Vanguard-- - The companies, I mean the companies. - Yes, yes, the companies within the funds are a little bit bigger, thank you. And if I click Vanguard, it shifts to the right. So, they're less value oriented, and you can look at fidelity as well, and you can look at Schwab and the Vanguard mutual funds. The way people are most likely to use this is they will pick a portfolio, say the ultimate buy-and-hold, 70/30, tax deferred or taxable. They will set a fixed income percentage, and then they will pick their family of funds. And once you've made those four choices on the left hand side, the tool tells you on the right hand side how much to put in each fund, what those funds are, what the expense ratio of the overall portfolio is. And we've updated all the metrics and statistics to for the splits or the price earnings, the yield, the geographic splits, et cetera. So, I think it's a very useful tool for somebody who's trying to figure out how these compare or how to implement once they've decided where they wanna go. - Do you have any idea how many people access this? Did we ever get any feedback from March? - It's many thousands, if not tens of thousands. So yeah, this tool's getting some visits. - That's terrific, that is just terrific. - Yeah. - And now, I think this is, I'm not asked myself this question, but when people are looking at the fine tuning tables, and the distribution tables, and the accumulation tables, all these tables that we have, these returns that we're thinking should be achievable from DFA and Avantis, it's not that the future's going to be just like the past. We understand that. You can't buy the past, but it would be more reasonable to say that what we're using now for the recommendations probably make it more likely that the better returns will be achieved by these funds. The CTFs. I mean, I'm not guaranteeing anything, but it feels like a right thing to be able to say. I think that I don't think that that's necessarily new. I think the old best in class recommendations gave people a great chance of success, and I think the new ones do too. I don't think there's any reason to believe that somebody chooses an all-avontist family or an all-DFA family has any reason to have a discount applied or a lower return expectation applied. The reason I say that is that our back testing is done with real funds from DFA and Avantis over the last 50 years, and 50 plus years, wherever they were available. We use indexes where they weren't and add reasonable expense ratios. I think it has been true. I think it still is true. I think somebody who invests in Vanguard is likely to get a little bit weaker tilts, but a little bit lower expense ratio. How that plays out for them, is going to depend on market conditions. There will be times when Vanguard outperforms. There will be times when Avantis outperforms. Times when DFA outperforms. I think they're all reasonable choices. I still give an edge to Avantis and DFA though, because of their academic foundation and the work that drove the construction of the portfolios that we have. Plus, I think it's important that since we're looking at the family as part of the answer, that these are two families that are offering a wide range of equity asset classes. There are other people. You can get a bridgewater portfolio that will probably do well. There are other families that are going to come into this part of the business. My belief is, just like I read the Vanguard literature, I read the DFA literature, I read and I watch videos on these sites. These are the people who are actually managing the money. It may be there's an advisor who is saying, "Well, I think you ought to have so much in this DFA fund and this Avantis fund." But at the end of the day, the people who are doing the hard work are the people at Avantis and the people at DFA and the people at Vanguard. And it isn't. This is the part that's so interesting to me. It isn't that the people who are working at the funds that are actively managed aren't working hard. They are working hard, but they're still in essence working under the umbrella of belief that their work is going to be better than the market. Because they can't do that work without believing that they're going to do it. Otherwise, they'd say, "Look, I'm a fake, I'm a fraud, I know I'm doing something that isn't going to work." It is different kind of work at the two different types of funds. These non-traditional index funds, the kind of work that they do is studying the academic literature, setting rules and systems in place to implement what the academic literature says is going to give you the most meaningfully diversified portfolio with the best expected return per unit of risk. Then implementing those rules consistently. That's a very different set of work than the fund manager who gets up and reads the paper every day and analyzes companies and talks to people, hundreds of people analyzing individual companies trying to pick winners, trying to rule out losers, trying to time when to be in cash, timing when to be in equities, letting their style and their exposure to factors drift over time for whatever they think is going to be most advantageous at that point in time. Following trends, they're just different things. They're just totally different things. Different kinds will work. In one huge way they are different, I think, that people may or may not overlook is that with the index, the traditional index fund, the responsibility is to match the return of the index. Which is determined by a committee or some other authority. Exactly. Do things that aren't done with the outcome that they match it, they can underperform it in the attempt to try to make it better. And the only thing they don't want to do is to underperform except by the expense ratio. I mean, they're stuck with the expense ratio. On the other hand, with the non-traditional index funds, they want to sell and buy or buy and sell in a way that is most efficient, most efficient tax-wise, most efficient, cost-wise. Because if you don't have to look like a market, you can buy when you want. When the price, let's say, when the price is reduced or where there's a large block that can be purchased all at one time. I mean, there's a lot of things that you have ways to do better. And so it's a totally different business. Yes, they do get a better expense ratio at a vodest. Let's say 15 basis points to 25 basis points generally. On the other hand, compared to maybe five or ten basis points at a vanguard, but they're doing so much more, way more responsibilities and way more things to check on before they do it. It's different than simply have, in essence, every day or every five days or whatever they're doing it with a traditional. So I just think it's a smarter product, smarter company. And I will tell you that John Bogle, I'm not saying he worshiped Fama in French, but I will tell you from my meeting with him, he thought they were a couple of really smart folks and the work that they were doing was very important, but that it wasn't for his clients because it was too complex. And we got to believe that our people that followed by the way, they're not our clients, there are students. And they don't pay anything to go to college here. It's all free, but the bottom line is, we have the confidence, or we're going to do all we can to help get you the confidence that you can do this and not feel like you're taking some big risk of losing all your money. And there are people who worry about those things. So Chris, you've done it again. Thank you so very, very much. And we will, I think the next one we're going to work on is a Q&A session. We haven't had Darrell with us for you with us for a Q&A session for some time and you got all. A union Q&A. That's right. That's a reunion Q&A. Good for you. All right, man. See you soon. Thank you all for watching and listening and being supportive of us. You are supportive of us in so many ways. I got a letter written to me by a man in his 30s. I can't read it without asking him for permission. After I record this right now, I'm going to call him and talk to him. And I may have to change his name, which is fine. I'm happy to change his name, but there are so many ways you can help us ideas, referrals. Some people actually donate money to our foundation. It's all helpful in us creating the work that we do. Thank you all and all the best to a stronger and better financial future. Thank you.