Welcome to the Bogleheads Chapter Series. This episode was jointly hosted by the San Antonio Bogleheads and the Starting Out Life States Chapter and recorded May 20th, 2021. It features Alan Roth, who's also a board member of the Bogle Center for Financial Literacy. Bogleheads are investors who follow John Bogle's investing philosophy for attaining financial independence.

This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. And we are now recording. Thank you, Alan, for joining us. A quick, quick introduction of Alan Roth. He is the board member and treasurer of the Bogle Center for Financial Literacy. He's the founder of WealthLogic.

He's a certified financial accountant, a certified financial planner, and has his master's in business administration. He was a corporate finance director for multi-billion dollar companies and author of the book How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street. He's a big advocate for keeping it simple. And my favorite, he has the professional goal to never be confused with Jim Cramer.

I always chuckled at that one. Thanks for joining us, Alan. My pleasure. And thank you, guys. You're the ones that do so much work to help so many people across the world. And thank you. Thanks, Alan. So the first question is in regards to the Bogle Center. So what are the goals of the Bogle Center for Financial Literacy?

And what can we expect to see going forward from that organization? Well, the pandemic, obviously, changed things a whole lot with conferences and the like. But we've been spending a lot of time on mission, vision, values, goals, et cetera. And what we want to do is, first of all, more support to the chapters.

And I think Gail is doing an amazing job spending an amazing amount of time on this. The conference, we want to get back into having in-person conferences again. It's not going to happen this year, but it will happen next year. And we are going to do more virtual conferences, the speaker series, et cetera.

We would-- kind of a lofty goal, but we want to develop some tools to help people in different modes of decision relating to the life cycle, spending, saving, spending, et cetera. And then finally, just so we can get the word out more, more media exposure. So those are kind of the high-level lofty goals that we would like to do more of.

Great. All right. Bartz has the next questions. Thank you again, Alan, for joining us tonight. John Bogle principles brought us together this evening, so we appreciate that. So our question is, what do you consider the basic principles of Boglehead investing? Well, first of all, I mean, John Bogle changed my life.

I didn't realize how common this was, but I sent him a letter once saying, I'd love to meet you. And a week later, got a letter back. I'm coming to Colorado in a few weeks. Let's get together. So he has just been an amazing man and mentor. Meeting him was kind of like meeting my favorite rock star president, et cetera.

But if I had to say what he taught me about investing-- and these are my words. Investing in eight words are minimizing expenses and emotions, maximizing diversification and discipline. It's that simple. When people violate that, they usually do so with their own peril. So it really is that simple.

And it was very easy, by the way, when my son was eight, because money didn't mean anything to him. The older we get, the more money means to us, and the harder it is to behave right. But Jack Bogle, I consider him a multibillion-dollar man in how much he saved people, not just at Vanguard, but at other firms that had to copy Vanguard to stay competitive.

OK, thank you. In some of your writing, we've noticed that you've been highly critical of investment advertisers. Can you tell us a little bit about that, your critical stance on investment advertising in general? Well, we were kind of joking before this started. I was going to sell an annuity at the end where we will give out the chicken dinners and the like.

But the more one spends on advertising, the higher the fees they have to charge. And if you think about it, advertising is all about emotions, is all about wanting to get a better value than just the market, et cetera. So for the most part, advertising-- I'm very critical of the CFP board, and I am a CFP.

The amount of advertising they're doing versus-- it's the opposite strategy of Jack Bogle. Jack Bogle wanted to do the right thing, and people would come. A lot of other firms and the CFP board, in my opinion, are doing the advertising and saying, hey, once we get more people and more money, then we'll lower fees and do things differently.

And that's kind of like the 12v1 fee model that failed miserably. So I mean, investing should be boring. It really should. And that would make a really lousy ad. Thank you. Great. And Royce has our next questions. Hi, Alan. So my first question's a multi-part one. So before we officially started the meeting, Miriam had mentioned in your books how you described the second grader portfolio.

Can you describe what that portfolio is and how someone goes about getting a proper stock bond allocation? And then also, is that different in different life stages? For example, you had mentioned your son's ad allocation. Has that changed since you wrote the book? Sure. Well, I mean, the basic-- you know, Taylor?

Taylor, great minds think alike. So the basic second grader portfolio is Taylor's three-fund portfolio, is a total US and a total international stock index fund. With just those two, you own over 10,000 companies across the planet. And then a total bond index fund, where you own all investment-grade, taxable, fixed-rate US bonds.

So it's pretty much that simple. When my son was eight, we had him at 90%. He's gotten a little bit more conservative now. He's 23, living out on his own in Madison, Wisconsin. And he's starting to think about maybe someday buying a house and such. So he wants to take a little risk off the table.

I'm not a believer in setting asset allocation. There's a couple of-- 100 minus your age, I don't believe in that. There's a risk profile questionnaire. And Jason Zweig, who's one of the three people I blame the most for getting me into writing, he and I have a disagreement. He says those risk profile questionnaires are worthless.

And I say, Jason, you're wrong. They're not that good. They're actually dangerous. If you think about it, March 19th of last year, when stocks hit an all-time high, we thought we could take a lot of risk. And suddenly, 33 days later, when the market fell 35%, our risk tolerance was very different.

But the biggest factor is our need to take risk, as Bill Bernstein puts it so eloquently, when you've won the game, quit playing. So you could be very young and not have to take much risk. You could be very old and need to take some risk. So there's not a cookie-cutter formula.

And I used to say, if you can't be right, at least be consistent. But now I think consistency is even more important, changing that asset allocation, moving in and out. I've seen people time the market poorly far more often, probably 99 to 1 timing things poorly, because our emotions fail us when it comes to investing.

So I don't have a cookie-cutter sort of answer. It's not 100 minus your age. It's not take this risk profile questionnaire. And again, somebody young that might want to be saving up for a house they want to buy in a couple of years, but they want to have some safer money.

So it's not that simple, setting the asset allocation. But consistency, consistency, consistency. Thanks. And in today's market, obviously, the markets change a little bit. And today, we have low interest rates. And so more people are thinking, oh, let me add more, go higher on my equities. And so what are your thoughts about bonds in a portfolio at the present time?

I totally disagree. My wife calls me the most argumentative person on the planet, and I prove her right daily. So I was once young. So when I graduated college, I was 22 years old, and I could get, I think it was 12% on a CD. Now, I tell that to clients and people, and they smile.

And I say, those actually weren't such good days. Because if you think about it, you invest 100,000, you got 12,000 interest. A third of it went to taxes. So you're left with about 8,000. And inflation was 13%, 14%. So you lost a lot more of your spending power than you're losing today.

So I change absolutely nothing when it comes to fixed income. The purpose of fixed income, in my opinion, has never been income. It's been the shock absorber, the stable portion of one's portfolio. And I'm very much a believer, whether it's one of the alternative second-grader strategies were to use CDs.

And I especially like CDs that have easy early withdrawal penalties, because if rates do rise, you don't suffer the loss that a bond fund would have. But always, always, always keep credit quality high when it comes to fixed income. Don't get greedy. Don't try to-- even a corporate bond fund, in my opinion, if you look what happened in March of last year, liquidity dried up.

And yes, the government stepped in and started buying both the corporate bonds and muni bonds, which shocked me, by the way. But there's no guarantee that they're going to do it next time. So trying to earn an extra 0.3%, 0.5%, and risking money, in my opinion, is not worth it.

Great. Thanks, Alan. The next couple of questions will be coming from Donna. Hello, Alan. Thank you for being here tonight. I have a question about asset allocation. Do you think that cryptocurrency can play a role in a diversified portfolio? And if so, how? I actually just wrote about it for AARP yesterday.

And people are kind of shocked. Rick Ferries made fun of me in the Bogleheads meeting, that I own Bitcoin. Yes, in 2017, I wrote about it. And I knew nothing about Bitcoin then, and I wanted to make sure that what I was writing was accurate, how you go out and buy it.

So I bought a lousy $200 worth of Bitcoin, which, even with the pullback, is still about a 10x, 1,000% return. So I actually walked away with a little bit more respect for Bitcoin than I thought when I wrote that 2017 article. Because number one, it really does disintermediate the banking system.

I mean, people can transact with Bitcoin, avoiding the bank. When I buy something on Amazon, which is one of the two largest retailers in the country, I get 2% cash back. So you know that Amazon is paying more than 2%. So to disintermediate that, I think, is a wonderful thing.

And finally, I love the fact that there's only a finite amount of Bitcoin out there. That's not true for all cryptocurrencies. Now, I certainly wouldn't tell anyone to even dream about putting more than 2% of their net worth in any cryptocurrency. And I think the odds are, in five or 10 years, it's going to be worth a lot less than it is today.

But I could be totally wrong. And I am quite worried, by the way, with all the amount of money that we're printing, the fiscal and monetary policy. But that doesn't necessarily-- Japan's been doing that for three decades and fighting deflation. I also wouldn't extrapolate one country's experience to what's going to happen here.

So I am quite worried. And crypto's kind of the digital version of gold. Well, it's been quite volatile lately. Oh, yes. Yeah, it makes gold or precious metals and mining fund is pretty volatile. But that even looks boring compared to crypto and Bitcoin. One tweet from Elon Musk and things change.

Right. One more. Is there a difference between the S&P 500 index fund and the total stock market index fund? And do you prefer one over the other? Yeah, there is a difference. I actually wrote a piece many years ago, the case against the S&P 500 index fund. And Kevin Laughlin, who was Jack Bogle's-- I like to call them chief operating officers rather than assistants.

And by the way, could he pick some great COOs? I knew Kevin Laughlin very well and Mike Nolan very well. And they're just amazing people. But what I was writing, the case against the S&P 500 index fund is that it doesn't own the other several thousand companies, few thousand companies.

It only makes up 20%. But owning everything is better. And what I wrote was, not only do you have the more diversification, but whenever a company is admitted into the S&P 500, the stock typically goes up in after hours trading because people know that all the S&P 500 index funds have to buy it.

And then I think this is fairly amazing that if you look at what did better last year, a small cap index fund, a mid cap index fund, an S&P 500 index fund, which is large cap, or a total stock index fund, one would think that one of the first three had to do better than the total.

But actually, the total beat all three by almost a couple of percentage points. Anyone know why? One company, Tesla, it wasn't in a small cap, in a mid cap, and it didn't get admitted to the S&P 500 until December 21st, almost the end of the year. Owning everything is better.

And of course, who brought us the total stock index fund? Jack Vogel. And of course, in the note that he wrote me, he said, of course, you're right, but the overall performance is pretty similar. And it's true, it is pretty similar. So I'm not one of those that believe in putting everything in small cap, putting everything in value or small cap value, but I don't want to ignore it either.

So the S&P 500 is going to miss out on small and mid cap. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Alan. A couple other questions that we received from the Vogelheads. What is a safe spot for people to put large amounts of cash that they do not want to take investing risks with?

I don't have a good answer. There's this general belief that cash is a riskless asset. But if you think about it, cash is going to be eaten up by inflation year after year after year, especially if you're young and have many, many years. There's this old saying that I don't know if it's true, and I'm not going to find out, but they say if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it jumps right out.

But if you put it in nice, cool room temperature water and slowly heat it up, it boils to death. Like I said, I don't know if it's true, and no, I have not done that. But when stocks plunge, oh, that cash feels warm and cozy. But Lucas, just think if you leave it in cash earning 0.01% in the Vanguard Treasury Money Market Fund, just think what that purchasing power is going to buy in 30 or 40 years.

The one exception might be if you're a federal employee and have access to the Thrift Savings Plan, and in particular, the G Fund, which gives you a bond return without any risk of principal. That's a wonderful thing. I've joked on federal news radio, will somebody hire me, pay me $1, give me enough time to move my IRA money into the Thrift Savings Plan, then you can fire me.

It's that good. Great. Let's see. Next question. For the typical accumulator, say someone aged 20 to 45, with all or mostly all of their assets in tax-advantaged accounts, what do you think will work best, the second-grader portfolio or low-cost target date fund from Vanguard? Well, if all of the assets are in tax-deferred, I think something like a low-cost Vanguard target date retirement fund is fine.

In fact, the target date funds used to have just the three funds in there. Now, they've added international bonds and a couple of other tips and the like. But I think it's just fine for somebody to have a low-cost target date retirement fund if they have all their assets in their tax-deferred.

I'm a believer in locating the assets. For example, if you look just at my IRA and 401(k) accounts, you'd say, "Wow." Not my traditional, not Roth. You'd say, "Roth is a weenie. He doesn't believe in stocks. He's all on fixed income." If you look just at my taxable accounts, you'd say, "Wow, Roth is a big risk taker.

He's very heavily in stocks." So what I'm trying to do is locate the assets with more tax efficiency, which isn't important if you have everything in a traditional tax-deferred IRA or 401(k). However, if you have a Roth, that's a different matter. You'd rather put the stocks in the Roth portion of that tax-advantaged account.

As long as it's low-cost, it's fine. The target date funds harness what I think is the most powerful force in the universe, inertia. In my book, I said that Albert Einstein called the power of compounding the most powerful force in the universe. Jason's wife told me that there's no way to know for sure, but that probably isn't true.

Great. Let's see. Royce, I think you have the next couple of questions. Given the variables such as generous employer contributions or the ability of the employee to maximize contributions that may influence the decision-making process, how should an individual decide between traditional and Roth 401(k) contribution options? Yeah, well, I invented the Roth.

I think the reason to have a Roth, a traditional and taxable money, in my opinion, is diversification from what Congress may ultimately do with tax laws. I'm a believer in all three. Now, with that said, somebody who's starting out in a lower tax bracket, there I tend to recommend the Roth.

Now, any employer contribution is going to go into a traditional, but if your tax rate is low, I'd consider, as my son is starting to invest in a Roth, because later on, his income will probably go up. I think tax rates will go up, and I'm using logic and we're talking politics, and I don't know why I keep making that mistake, since logic and politics have little in common.

So, I'm a believer overall in having different tax wrappers, and that includes the Roth, the traditional, and the taxable. Now, the Roth is my smallest tax wrapper, because it's the newest. Did that answer your question? Did you want to know more about the employer match? We can move on, and if people have questions on that at the end, we can address those.

So, my second question is, with the many financial tools we have out there on the web and elsewhere, what tools do you typically recommend that accumulators use to determine how much to save and when they're able to retire? Yeah, you know, I've used a zillion different tools in Monte Carlo simulations.

I even wrote one for Jack Bogle, you know, obviously many, many years ago. I think most of the online tools and such, especially the ones coming from the financial institutions, are in la-la land, that they make certain assumptions on returns, and you know, the Monte Carlo model itself can be brilliant, but you put garbage assumptions in, and guess what?

You get garbage assumptions out. So, I think a much simpler and better way to do it is think of wealth in terms of years instead of dollars. So, in other words, if you need $50,000 a year to live on, and you have $200,000, you have four years worth of living expenses.

Four years worth of financial freedom, and that, I think, is a better framework. You know, maybe you can assume that it might grow after taxes and inflation, depending upon the allocation, at one or two percent a year, but in my opinion, that's a much better way of framing it and thinking about the things, and boy, can those fees and taxes take from those returns.

But again, I think of wealth in terms of number of years of financial freedom, rather than dollars. So, somebody, you know, with a million dollars that needs $50,000 a year to live on has 20 years of financial freedom. Somebody with $10 million that has $5 million that they need to be happy, they're pretty poor, and you can get rich quick, really, by living frugally, because by changing that denominator and try to figure out what makes you happy and what doesn't, and with all the mistakes I've made in my life, I should be brilliant.

I still remember as a kid thinking that if I went to the movie, that would be over in two hours, but if I bought something with it, like a model airplane, I'd have it forever and ever, and boy, did I have it wrong. Jonathan Clements taught me that. It's experiences that bring happiness, not stuff.

All right. Thanks, John. Bart has the next couple of questions. Okay. Most of us mobile heads, you know, we've done a pretty good job of saving lives, but as we get closer to retirement, is there any spending and withdrawal strategies that we should be taking a look at? Yeah.

I've always said that investing is simple. I never said taxes were. There is no cookie cutter. You always spend down the taxable money first, tax deferred. In general, the Roth is the last money you'd want to spend. That's your most valuable money under current tax law, of course, but there are many times, by the way, that especially if you have delayed social security, you haven't hit the RMD, you might want to take money out of the tax deferred account and use up that 12% marginal tax rate or take some of it and convert it to a Roth, and then finally, you might not want to do any of those because you might be at the 0% federal long-term capital gains rate.

You might want to harvest, as Mike Piper eloquently puts it, tax gain harvesting. By the way, you don't have to wait 31 days. You could sell VTI or VTSAX and then buy it back immediately and recognize that gain at a 0% federal tax rate. For those of you in Texas, I say with envy in my eyes, you have the 0% state tax rate.

Donna, is that why you moved? Yes, it was part of the reason. Yes, for sure. There are various strategies on the withdrawal. I would never let that, well, I shouldn't say ever, but generally speaking, you don't want to let that 12% marginal federal tax rate go to waste. I think the odds are, I reserve the right to be wrong yet again, that tax rates aren't going to go any lower than that.

Speaking of Social Security and stuff that's usually pretty complicated, how do you feel about the rule of thumb about postponing Social Security till you're 70 years old? Certainly, number one, the best resource by far is Mike Piper's OpenSocialSecurity.com. I mean, I hate Mike because he's a lot smarter than me and he's a whole lot nicer than me.

He gives it away, but it is absolutely brilliant. I mean, I can't describe some of the things in that model like an insurance company. Every other calculator assumes that I'm 63 years old, I'm going to die in exactly 23 years, whatever, but he's using actuarial tables and probabilities. The answer to your question is the only reason, well, obviously, if you don't have the money and you're going to live under a bridge, yes, I would take the money at 62 in that case, but the high, we're talking about a couple, the person with the highest benefit should almost always wait till age 70.

The only exception would be if both parties in the couple were in horrible health and had a very, very short life expectancy, but even if one was in horrible health and the other was healthy, you would wait till age 70. It goes against our emotions because our emotions tell us I've been paying this FICA tax for decades.

I want to get my money now, so the emotions say to take it immediately. When it comes to investing in finance, our emotions typically fail us. If something feels good, it's usually bad. If something feels bad, it's usually good. Yes, I totally agree, wait till age 70 for the higher benefit of a couple, or if you're a single person in good health, wait till age 70.

Obviously, if you have other assets elsewhere, and I tell people to go ahead. Bart, let's say you had a $2,000 a month benefit, but if you waited five more years, it would grow significantly. I'd say go ahead and spend that $2,000 today because what you're really doing is buying an inflation protected deferred annuity.

You used to be able to buy those on the open market. You can't anymore, but when I priced it, it was like buying it at about a 45% discount. Over what you could buy from an insurance company, and guess what? That insurance company is not backed by the US government.

All right, Donna, you have the next couple of questions. Well, adding to the social security question and Mike Piper's calculator in particular, he uses the present value calculation. I was just wondering if you had a recommendation for what interest rate should be used when we're doing the present value calculations for social security or for annuities to evaluate them?

Well, what Mike uses is a real discount rate, and that is absolutely the thing to do. When I do a private pension analysis for somebody, then I use a nominal rate, and that rate can vary. If the pension is from the federal government, I use a lower discount rate than if it's a private company, especially if the pension is above the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp or isn't backed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp.

I use rates, a very, very long-term bond interest rate in doing the discounting. Then I actually, for conservatism, raise it just a little bit because unlike a bond, you can't trade it. Once you've made that decision to take the pension, you can't diversify it and you can't then change your mind.

Okay. New topic, given the change of administration in the White House, has that changed any of your thoughts on long-term financial planning, perhaps policy in particular? Yeah. First of all, investing, not a bit. I've written pieces, people that lost a lot of money making a costly bet against Obama, people that lost a lot of money making a costly bet against Trump.

When it comes to investing, you have to know something the market doesn't already know. When it comes to policy, all we're hearing about change in the estate exemption, changes in the long-term capital gains rate, step-up basis, and most of these are for those very, very wealthy, the upper 1%.

But I've seen more people make mistakes trying to predict what politicians are going to do, creating irrevocable trusts so the kids lose out on the step-up basis, etc., thinking that the exemption was going to be a million dollars. They've created an expensive infrastructure that they didn't need. I've spoken to Mike Piper a lot about this.

Trying to make changes based upon what we think is going to happen is a hard thing to do. The only thing that I was sure of, I forgot what year it was, that the estate tax exemption became unlimited. I was absolutely sure Congress was not going to let that happen, but yet they did.

Trying to predict politicians, is a very difficult thing to do. Sure. And neither party wants to work together these days. I wish they could do something to solve our healthcare where we spend more than twice per capita of any other country on healthcare with the shortest life expectancy of any developed country.

Great. Thank you, Alan. So that concludes the questions from the San Antonio Bogleheads chapter. Next up, we'll have a few questions from the Starting Out Life stage, and those will be asked by Miriam. Thank you, Alan. These are for young people who are starting out in their investing career or investors of any age who are late starters and realize they have to get going.

My first question is, when young people get their first job, they often receive a big glossy 401k pamphlet. It has dozens of mutual funds. It has columns with 30-day returns, 5-year returns, 10-year returns, ER percent. What should they do with all that information? How can they assess that information when all they really want to do is select something and move on with their life?

And their HR department, the human resources department cannot help them. They don't really know anything about the funds or a portfolio. Good question. There's a whole lot of research that shows that when a company has dozens of funds in their 401k that a large portion of the participants are going to throw up their hands and just say, "I'll put it in cash," which is that frog boiling.

So they are getting better. There's a lot of default options now where if you don't pick anything, it will automatically go to a life cycle fund, a target date retirement fund based on your age, which I think is a wonderful thing as long as it's a low cost sort of plan.

I think it was about seven, eight years ago, a Supreme Court ruling showed that the trustees of corporate 401k plans had a fiduciary duty to offer low cost, good investments. So the 401ks have gotten so much better over the period of time, offering low cost sorts of things. So I would tell people just probably look for starting out a low cost target date retirement fund if they have that.

Pick that, ignore the rest of the stuff. Make sure that ER, that expense ratio is low. Thank you. My next question is, what is your advice for young investors who are so tempted to make more money and jump into GameStop and Robinhood adventures? I would tell them to try to get their excitement from someplace else other than investing.

And it's hard because you hear stories about how much your friend made in Bitcoin, how much your other friend made in GameStop and the like, and some of those may be true. Most of them probably aren't, or they're not talking about where they lost money, et cetera. But yeah, I would tell them to try to avoid that.

Get their excitement elsewhere. Like I said, excitement has its place, but not in investing. Investing needs to be boring. Thank you. And this is coming from a guy who I knew I was going to get rich quick when I was 22 years old and put money in gold, which over what, 30 some odd years has barely kept up with inflation.

So I doubled my $6,000. Had I heard of Jack Bogle and his S&P 500 index fund, instead of making 6,000, any guess how much money I would have made? Over a million? Very close to a million, about 700,000. Like I said, I ought to be brilliant with as many mistakes as I've made.

So yeah, there's always going to be a Bitcoin, a GameStop, a gold, and I would try to avoid those things, except for maybe a fun little gambling portfolio. That's fine to carve out a little bit of money to have fun with. Regarding the issue of paying off student loans versus using the money to invest in your retirement accounts, what are the factors you believe are important to consider?

And what is your opinion about this? How would you make that decision? How would you advise young people to make that decision? Well, I guess the first thing I would say is never, ever, ever miss out on an employer match. That's free money. So do I like paying off debt?

Absolutely. But never miss out on that free money. The one exception might be if you don't plan to stay at the job long enough for the employer match to become vested. So that's free money. Never miss out on that. Depending upon your tax situation, that debt may or may not be tax deductible.

But I consider all debt the inverse of a bond. Because a bond, you're lending a bank, our total bond fund, you're lending money to the US government, you're lending money to corporations, et cetera. They're paying you principal and interest. Debt, whether it's the mortgage, car, student loan, is just the opposite.

So to the extent that you can earn greater than a bond return by paying down debt, should go ahead and do that. So depending on how expensive the debt is, whether or not they're getting a tax deduction, and whether or not they've contributed enough to their 401(k) to get the employer match.

My next question is, is there any real value, or should a young investor seriously consider tilting their portfolio to value funds, and in particular, small cap value, since they do have a longer investing lifetime ahead of them? In my opinion, no. Some people experimented with drugs when they were younger.

I experimented with DFA. And I think DFA is an amazingly good fund family, dimensional fund advisors. But one reason I think they are so good, Fama and French, who really popularized the small cap value tilted portfolio and dimensional fund advisors and the like, they never said it was a free lunch.

They said it was compensation for taking on more risk. And I also found that the DFA funds were far less tax efficient. So on one hand, I don't believe in ignoring small cap. I don't believe in ignoring value. But I also don't believe in overweighting it. And if you think of the second grader math, or as Jack Bogle would say, the humble rules of arithmetic, I think that was his phrase.

If one part of the market does better, another part of the market has to underperform. And lately, it has been small cap value, until just recently. And we don't know how far that's going to continue. But the fees are forever. And I'm seeing more and more tilted portfolios mixed with alternative asset classes and the like that are worse than, in my opinion, a lower cost Dodge and Cox, or even American funds, active.

So I believe that, for instance, if somebody picked a 60/40 DFA portfolio with a small cap value tilt, that that might be equivalent to a 65/35 market cap weighted Vanguard type of portfolio. And you'd have lower costs and more tax efficiency. It's a viable active strategy. And if you do it, you've got to stick with it, in my opinion.

Moving back and forth is a recipe to do worse than both. Well, when young people look at those graphs, and they see that when I look at those graphs, and I see small cap value, just down at the bottom of the graph, for a long period of time, for years at a time, you wonder, well, when is it going to make the money?

You want to earn some, have a return. And if it's not going to do it, and then 10 years later, you get out of it. Yeah, well, I mean, there's going to be reversion to the mean. It's not always going to underperform. It's not always going to outperform. And all I could say is, it was about seven years ago, every conference I was at, seemed like every 30, 60 seconds, I was hearing factor tilting, smart beta, small cap value, et cetera.

And I think that was a warning sign. And by the way, I told you I'm not nearly as nice as Mike Piper. If I knew how to beat the market, the last thing I would do is tell you guys, or write about it, I would be rich. Because even if that small cap value, and I think there is some logic to it, but the more that it's known, the less likely it is to work going forward.

So I'm not going to small cap value tilt. I'm not going to go with, what's her name? Kathy Wood didn't do the large cap growth either. So I'm going to get hit by people on both sides about how stupid I am. I embrace dumb beta. Thanks for those responses.

We have about 10 minutes left. So we'll spend the next 10 minutes answering questions from the chat. And at this time, I will be stopping the recording. So thank you.