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I'm not quite sure how I missed this. It was really cold in Texas last week, but I hadn't realized that hell had, indeed, frozen over! Suffice it to say that I don't read Barron's. But, at DFA's Dallas study group meeting yesterday, a lot of the participants found this to be rather amusing. It's a lot like CNN choosing Glenn Beck as man of the year or Fox News choosing George Soros for some honor. Nevertheless, it did actually happen. Here are some excerpts from the article:
Dimensional Fund Advisors, whose quant[itative] funds operate almost like indexes, was in precisely the right markets and watched its pennies.-
Of course, it’s impossible to time stock- and bond-market changes and the strategy that’s paid off for the best big fund families – as well as investors – is a diversified one. Our No. 1, DFA, is a global asset manager that oversees $206.5 billion in all and owns a mind-boggling 13,000 stocks, or about 70% of the world’s publicly listed equities. Because DFA’s investment process is purely quantitative, it doesn’t have the option of succumbing to fear in the face of adversity. It certainly helped that DFA focuses much of its attention on some of last year’s highest-performing equity areas – value, small-cap and emerging markets.-
The privately held firm (Arnold Schwarzenegger is an investor) also is known for keeping a lid on costs that can rob shareholders of performance points, steering clear of some foreign markets where it doesn’t believe funds can get a fair shake on prices.
Weston Wellington, a Vice President at DFA, once said "Fama doesn't read Barron's and readers of Barron's don't read Fama." That may still be true, but the Barron's readers might at least now know who he is.