Do You Know These 12 Investing Acronyms? | The Informed Investor 32

Episode 32: Can you define BRICS or BATMMAAN?

If not, maybe you've got FOMO?

OK, we're talking investing acronyms. For the record:

• BRICS is a term coined in 2001 to represent investment opportunities in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. (South Africa was added in 2011.)
• BATMMAAN stands for the following tech companies: Broadcom, Apple, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and NVIDIA.
• FOMO (fear of missing out) is what you get when you're worried (unnecessarily?) that other people know, have, or do something you don't.

In the investment world, people throw around acronyms regularly. From ETFs (exchange-traded funds) and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to ESG (environmental, social, governance) and SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies), there seems to be a trendy acronym for everything.

You might feel smart if you know the lingo or feel the opposite if you don't.

Either way, what really matters if whether acronyms can help you invest, and on that score, the evidence isn't all that convincing.

Looking at the BRICS from 2001 to 2025, only India outperformed a broad emerging markets index, and Russia literally became uninvestable. (MSCI data © MSCI 2026, all rights reserved.)

Tech stock jargon—think FAANG and BATMMAAN—has proven more rewarding due to the tendency for strong market performance to be concentrated in a subset of companies.

But that's also a cautionary tale. Big firms with winning stocks don't necessarily keep winning. https://www.dimensional.com/us-en/insights/large-and-in-charge-why-to-think-twice-before-chasing-only-big-stocks.

Investors with concentrated portfolios may actually miss out on the very stocks that deliver the best of what the market has to offer.

FWIW, YOLO (you only live once) is a fun acronym used as a justification for doing something less than cautious (because of expense, danger, risk of seeming foolish, etc.), but it's not a sound investment philosophy.

In Episode 32 of "The Informed Investor," Dimensional's Mark Gochnour, Head of Global Client Services, Wes Crill, PhD, Senior Client Solutions Director, and Jake DeKinder, Head of Client Communications, explain investing acronyms that investors may want to know—and several they might consider ignoring.

LINKS FROM TODAY'S EPISODE:

The Informed Investor: Feedback Survey

https://www.dimensional.com/us-en/informed-investor-survey

The Informed Investor on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCyJr6FFig-h1mA7rVP7Mbk0irFw2wA90

Dimensional Fund Advisors Shorts on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dimensionalfundadvisors/shorts

Mark Gochnour on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-gochnour-9a23598a/

Wes Crill on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/wes-crill-77a49417/

Jake DeKinder on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-d-4105b98/

Learn more at https://www.dimensional.com/