The Rational Reminder Podcast

A skeptical look at private equity, credit, and real estate and why their smooth returns may be misleading. They unpack illiquidity, valuation opacity, gated funds, and fee complexity. Discussion covers retail distribution risks, manager selection challenges, secondary-market discounts, and how private-market structures can hide real volatility.

Eduardo Repetto, CIO of Avantis Investors with a background at Dimensional, and Caitlin Ebanks, CIBC ETF strategist, discuss Avantis’ new Canadian ETF lineup. They cover product design, fee discipline, direct security ownership versus fund-of-funds, the new CAGE asset-allocation ETF, implementation details like turnover and tracking error, and how these funds aim to make factor investing simpler and more accessible.

Shelley Antoniewicz, ICI chief economist who studies who invests in index funds. Jim Rowley, Vanguard research leader on index implementation and myths. Tim Edwards, S&P DJI strategist on index history and concentration. They discuss 50 years of index investing, market concentration, index mechanics, ETF trading and implementation, and how indexing has shaped fees and investor choice.

James Choi, Yale finance professor known for practical household finance research, presents a spreadsheet-based shortcut to classic lifecycle portfolio choice. He explains Merton’s formula, how human capital often acts bond-like, the roles of wealth and risk aversion, transitory versus permanent wage risk, and how simple rules like 100-minus-age compare to his approximation.

Tom Hardin, a former hedge fund analyst turned informant and now speaker on ethics and financial crime. He recounts how small rationalizations and pressure led to insider trading, how networks and hedge fund culture normalized illicit tips, the mechanics of cooperating with the FBI, and his path toward redemption and redefining success.

Hendrik Bessembinder, an academic who studies asset returns and performance measurement, joins to dissect leveraged ETFs and rethink how returns are measured. He unpacks daily rebalancing, underperformance drivers, and risks of inverse funds. Then he introduces the sustainable return concept as a cash-flow–focused alternative to standard averages.

Theresa Ebden, Vice President of the Investor Office at the Ontario Securities Commission, leads investor research, education and outreach. She discusses modern retail risks like AI-enhanced scams, finfluencers, dark patterns and gamification. Short practical topics include how the OSC uses contact-centre data, GetSmarterAboutMoney.ca, and mitigation ideas for AI impersonation and impulsive trading.

Dr. Charles Chaffin, professor and author specializing in financial psychology and goal-setting. He explores why our survival-wired brains and biases sabotage long-term plans. Short talks cover money scripts, financial flashpoints, identity-based goals, risk tolerance measurement, psychometric tools, and practical fixes like automation, if-then plans, and coaching to align behavior with financial plans.

A lively dive into equal-weighted versus market-cap-weighted index funds. They outline how equal weighting shifts exposure toward smaller, cheaper, and more volatile stocks and creates sector tilts. The conversation covers historical outperformance, recent underperformance, higher turnover and trading costs, rebalancing frequency, and how equal weighting can trade against momentum.

What if financial planning mirrored engineering design? This discussion transforms financial planning into a methodical process, distinguishing between solid plans and mere projections. The conversation emphasizes the role of goals-based planning and the importance of trade-offs when addressing multiple objectives. Insights on handling uncertainty, leveraging sensitivity analysis, and enhancing client communication are shared, all underpinned by an engineering mindset. The dialogue also explores sustainable spending and the nuances of retirement planning, backed by practical case studies.