Elroy Dimson – Investing & Optimism
5/7/20261 hr 14 min
In this episode, we are joined by Elroy Dimson, Professor of Finance at Cambridge Judge Business School and co-creator of the Dimson-Marsh-Staunton (DMS) dataset, for a sweeping and deeply insightful conversation on financial history, market behavior, and the evolution of global investing. Elroy walks us through the origins of the groundbreaking Triumph of the Optimists, the challenges of assembling over 100 years of global return data, and the critical biases that once shaped our understanding of markets. We explore how expanding beyond U.S.-centric data reshaped expectations for the equity risk premium, why economic growth doesn't necessarily translate into...
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First 90 secondsBenjamin Felix· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, chief investment officer, and Brayden Warwick, financial planning product architect at PWL Capital. Welcome to episode four hundred and eight. I love the conversation that we just had, Brayden, and it's an episode that I have wanted to do for a long time. Professor Elroy Dimson is a busy man. I was on another podcast in the UK, and that person, Damian, it's the Damian Talks Money podcast, has a relationship with Elroy, and so he made an introduction which finally got the connection made. We would have done this one sooner if we could have, I guess is the point of my long preamble, but I'm super excited that we got to talk to Elroy Dimson. He is a professor of finance and research director at Cambridge Judge Business School, and by fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is also emeritus professor of finance at London Business School. Listeners will likely know his name, Elroy Dimson, which is the D in the DMS data, which we've talked about many times because we use it a lot in our own research at PWL. We also did an episode, I can't remember the episode number, but we did an episode a while ago, something like Lessons from a Hundred Years of Stock Returns or something, where we went through a bunch of their past reports. They do something called the Global Investment Returns Yearbook that they've been