Matt Hall shares how reading Larry Swedroe’s first book brought him solace after having spent time in an industry where everything was too akin to gambling in Vegas.

We love celebrating milestones and 2015 marks the 10th anniversary of Hill Investment Group! When our firm was founded June 6th of 2005 it was based on friendship, vision and passion. Rick Hill and I met every Wednesday night and Saturday morning for a year. We would discuss building the perfect firm, one we called “the island of idealism.” We are grateful you have joined us in taking the long view and are as committed to serving you as ever.

You’ll be seeing a lot of the photo above, as it is the most recent of our growing team. Thanks to photographer Ashley Gieseking for her fine work.

It’s certainly not the “Dow” as Allan Sloan so excellently covered in his recent piece. (You can also find the perfect summary by The Week here.) It’s not even the S&P 500—which is just the 500 largest companies in the U.S. Add in nearly all US, International, and Emerging Market stocks, bringing your total in the neighborhood of 12,000 companies, and then you’ll have a feel for what we call global capitalism. That’s also what we at Hill consider to be the true market. The image above shows the percent that each country represents in world market capitalization as of December 31, 2014. Note where some markets might be much smaller that expected. Even the U.S. only represents 52% of the total, whereas most investors we meet come with portfolios that have little other exposure outside of that.