Odds On

Matt Hall co-founded Hill Investment Group and wrote this as an argument for evidence-based investing aimed at individual investors and at advisers who want to change how they work. The position is the standard one derived from academic finance: markets are difficult to beat, costs and taxes are the reliably controllable variables, factor exposures explain most of the return differences between portfolios, and investor behaviour destroys more return than security selection creates.

Hall's contribution is less the argument than the account of adopting it. He describes his own start in a traditional brokerage environment selling active products, his encounter with the academic research and with Dimensional Fund Advisors, and the commercial difficulty of moving a practice to an approach that gives clients less to talk about. He argues that the adviser's real work is behavioural: preventing clients from acting on forecasts, from chasing performance, and from abandoning a plan during drawdowns.

The book is short and promotional in places, since Hall's firm sells the service he is describing. It contains no original research and readers wanting the evidence should go to the underlying academic work or to Swedroe and Berkin. Its value is as an accessible statement of the position and as an account of what changing an advisory practice actually costs.