As you’ve likely heard, the podcast is up and running – spreading our story and message to curious investors around the world. We’re thrilled with the success of the launch and encourage you to listen to all four episodes when you can find the time. All feedback is welcome. We offer the following write up as a teaser for Episode 4.

When most athletes transition from the sports world to the business world, the process is painstakingly slow. For Dave Butler, it took 24 hours.

After attending the University of California-Berkeley, Butler was drafted by the Boston Celtics in the 1987 NBA draft. But a player’s strike and a torn calf muscle cut his hoops career short. After a final stint with a pro team in England, Butler marched into his coach’s office, told him he took a job on Wall Street, and hopped on a flight to New York the next morning.

Since trading his basketball jersey for a suit, Butler has built an impressive career, ultimately leading him to his current role as the Co-CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors. Today, more than two decades after stepping off the hardwood, Dave Butler joins Matt Hall on episode 4 of Take the Long View: the podcast that nudges you to reframe your thoughts about your money, emotions, behavior, and time.

Listen to the episode here via Apple or here through other platforms.

Key topics discussed:

• Introducing Dave. [00:42]

• Dave’s background in professional basketball. [04:10]

• Dave’s transition from basketball to finance. [06:14]

• Dave’s early days in finance. [07:17]

• Starting out at Dimensional. [11:04]

• The origins of indexing. [14:02]

• Early days of Dimensional and the 9-10 fund. [16:10]

• Setting and meeting expectations. [18:35]

• Philosophical alignment. [19:45]

• Dan Wheeler’s influence. [21:52]

• Dimensional’s reach and its growth over the years. [26:17]

• Finding balance between work and other areas of life. [30:14]

• Dave’s favorite part of working at Dimensional. [33:32]

• Dimensional as a visionary in the field. [35:57]

• Investing philosophy. [38:25]

• Talking finance at parties. [42:08]

• Current projects. [44:23]

A professor set a large jar in front of her class of savvy business students and filled it with fist-sized rocks until it was full.

“Is the jar full?” she asked the class.

Most of the class nodded in approval. Then, she took out a bag of gravel, and dropped a handful of it into the jar until it slid into all the spaces between the big rocks. “Now is it full?” The class was starting to catch on. Several students said the jar wasn’t full yet.

“Well, let’s find out,” she said. The professor brought out a bucket of sand and poured it into the jar. With a few shakes, the sand filled the tiny crevices around the rocks and gravel.

“Is it full now?” she asked yet again. The class thought: What could possibly be smaller than sand? Sure enough, the professor took out a jug of water from behind her desk and poured it into the jar where it diffused through the rocks, gravel, and sand, filling the jar to the brim.

“Your life is like this jar,” she explained. “If you don’t put in your big rocks first, they’ll never fit around the little stuff.”

We did not write this story; it’s been around for years. We’ve heard it a hundred times or more from financial thought leader Larry Swedroe, and Matt Hall felt it was so powerful, he included it in his book Odds On.

If anything, the message becomes more relevant as each day passes. In 2019, it’s easier than ever to fill our proverbial jars with sand and water: shopping, entertainment, text messages, and so on. Meanwhile, there’s less and less room for our big rocks: family, community, education, financial freedom – the not-so-sexy yet foundational qualities of a life well-lived.

Our job at Hill Investment Group isn’t just to maximize the value of your investment portfolio. That’s part of it, but our greater job is to help you put your big rocks in place. All of them.

How’s your jar looking?

Where would we be without alphabetic order in our life? Imagine if airports listed all departures randomly on their flight boards? We might never make it to the gate.

But should you find your investments alphabetically? When you’re presented with a list of available funds, should you prefer the ones that appear toward the top of the list?

This is not a trick question. Of course, the answer is no. It shouldn’t matter one bit where a fund name falls on an alphabetic list. And yet, amazingly, a recent study found that many investors may be unintentionally allowing “alphabeticity bias” to creep into their decisions anyway.

The study, “Alphabeticity Bias in 401(k) Investing,” is slated to be published in a forthcoming issue of The Financial Review. Investment selections in 401(k) retirement plans are often presented in alphabetic order, so the study’s authors took a look at whether plan participants were allowing that order to influence their choices. They found that, indeed, “alphabeticity – the order that fund names appear when listed in alphabetical order – significantly biases participants’ investment allocation decisions.” The longer the list of selections, the more alphabeticity bias appeared.

Why would we do this? The authors proposed the reason is related to another bias they called “satisficing.” When you’re reviewing an alphabetic list of choices, once you’ve found one that suits your purpose, you tend to give less consideration to the rest of the list. “My work here is done,” your brain tells you, and it shuts down … even if there may be an even better selection further on.

You shouldn’t, and we won’t, settle for next-best investments – in your retirement plan or anywhere else. Helping you avoid doing so is one way we encourage you to Take the Long View® when you invest.