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Whatever the reason, the existence of some persistent investment factors is today accepted by almost every (if not all) financial economist and investor. In an ingenious bit of marketing, factors are often called “smart beta.” Sharpe himself grew to hate the term, as it implies that all other forms of beta are dumb.10 Most financial academics prefer the term “risk premia,” to more accurately reflect the fact that they think these factors primarily yield an investment premium from taking some kind of risk—even if they cannot always agree what the precise risk is. An important milestone was when Fama and his frequent collaborator Ken French—another Chicago finance professor who would later also join DFA—in 1992 published a paper with the oblique title “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns.”11 It was a bombshell. In what would become known as the three-factor model, Fama and French used data on companies listed on the NYSE, the American Stock Exchange, and the Nasdaq from 1963 to 1990 and showed that both value (the tendency of cheap stocks to outperform expensive ones) and size (the tendency of smaller stocks to outperform bigger ones) were distinct factors from the broader market factor—the beta. Although Fama and French’s paper termed these factors as rewards for taking extra risks, coming from the father of the efficient-markets hypothesis, it was a signal event in the history of financial economics.12 Since then academics have identified a panoply of factors, with varying degrees of durability, strength, and acceptance. Of course, factors do not always work. They can go through long fallow stretches where they underperform the market. Value stocks, for example, suffered a miserable bout of performance in the dotcom bubble, when investors wanted to buy only trendy technology stocks. And to DFA’s chagrin, after small caps enjoyed a robust year in DFA’s first year of existence, they would then undergo a long, painful seven-year period of trailing dramatically behind the S&P 500.13 DFA managed to keep growing, losing very few clients, partly because it had always stressed to them that stretches like this could happen. But it was an uncomfortable period that led to many awkward conversations with clients.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)