Our Style. Our Substance.
On the research behind our portfolios, and the harder work of staying with it.
I've been an advisor for more than two decades. I've seen plenty of ups and plenty of downs, and through all of it, I've tried to keep true to the same handful of beliefs.
A few years ago, clients of ours retired in 2022. Their first year of retirement was a down market, for stocks and bonds alike. Not the welcome anyone hopes for. But it was the kind of year we'd planned for from the start, so instead of rewriting the plan, we followed it.
Four years later, they'd tell you they're living their best life. In their words, not mine. Those beliefs didn't come from nowhere. So this post is less about funds and more about where they came from.
"Anyone can pick or own the right funds when they're up. The substance is still owning them when it's hard."Chris Benda, Founder, Benda & Co.
A ROOM FULL OF ASTROLOGERS
In 1998, Fortune asked Eugene Fama about professional stock pickers. His answer has been repeated in finance classrooms ever since: "I'd compare stock pickers to astrologers, but I don't want to bad-mouth astrologers."
Fama, who shared the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, spent his career at the University of Chicago studying how quickly prices absorb new information. The short version of his conclusion: very quickly. Fast enough that consistently outguessing the market, after costs, is a game very few people win, and fewer still win on purpose.
That idea sits under nearly everything we do. And two people who learned it from Fama built the firms that make up the largest share of our portfolios.
TWO STUDENTS, ONE TEACHER
David Booth studied under Fama at Chicago and, in 1981, co- founded Dimensional Fund Advisors to put that research to work: broadly diversified, low-turnover portfolios that lean toward smaller, lower-priced and more profitable companies. The business school at Chicago now carries his name. Coincidentally, it's also where I completed the coursework for my Certified Private Wealth Advisor® designation, a program built for advisors serving families with significant wealth and the complexity that comes with it.
Cliff Asness wrote his dissertation under Fama, on momentum, which is a bit like writing your thesis on why your advisor might be slightly wrong. In 1998 he co-founded AQR Capital Management, which applies the same body of evidence across stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities, and can use tools a traditional fund can't, like shorting, futures and arbitrage.
Same teacher, different tools. That pairing is deliberate. Dimensional gives us patient, long-only exposure at the core. AQR carries the same ideas into the defensive and alternative side, where we want return streams that don't simply rise and fall with the stock market.
If you'd like the story told properly, Dimensional asked Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning director of The Fog of War, to make a documentary about it. It's called Tune Out the Noise. It features Fama, Booth, Ken French and an improbable number of Nobel laureates, and it's free on YouTube.
It may be the only film where the dramatic tension builds toward an index fund. Somehow, it works.
OUR STYLE.
Here is how that lineage shows up in a Benda & Co. portfolio.
AN EVIDENCE-BASED CORE: Broad, diversified exposure built on decades of academic research rather than forecasts or hunches.
PURPOSEFUL SATELLITES: Smaller positions, each with a specific job. If we can't explain what a holding is for, it doesn't belong.
A DIVERSIFIED DEFENSE: 2022 reminded everyone that stocks and bonds can fall at the same time. That is why our defensive sleeve doesn't rely on bonds alone. A meaningful share goes to diversifiers like managed futures and arbitrage, strategies built to behave differently from both.
Every holding has a target, and we hold ourselves to it. When stocks run, we trim back. When they fall, we add. Rebalancing is the moment discipline stops being a philosophy and becomes a trade, and it rarely feels good when we do it. That is usually the sign it's doing its job.
"Rebalancing is the moment discipline stops being a philosophy and becomes a trade."Chris Benda, Founder, Benda & Co.
BUILT ON, NOT LIMITED TO
That portfolio is our foundation, not our ceiling. When a client's situation calls for it, we build on it with a few more specialized tools. Each one has to earn its place the same way everything else does: with evidence, a clear job, and honest trade-offs.
DIRECT INDEXING: Instead of owning a fund that holds the market, you own the individual stocks yourself. The exposure looks much the same, but the tax picture can look very different. In any given year, some stocks are down even when the market is up, and owning them directly lets us harvest those losses to offset gains elsewhere. It also allows customization, such as working around a concentrated stock position or excluding companies you'd rather not own. The trade-off is that the benefit is largest early on and for investors with real tax bills to manage, so it's a fit for some clients, not all.
PRIVATE EQUITY AND PRIVATE DEBT: The number of U.S. public companies has fallen by roughly 40 percent since the late 1990s, as more companies stay private longer. Private equity and private credit can widen the opportunity set and add a return stream driven by different forces than the stock market. We approach them with clear eyes. Your money is tied up for years, fees are higher, and the smooth returns often reflect how rarely these assets are priced as much as how little they move. Cliff Asness has a name for that: volatility laundering. We use privates as a diversifier, sized so that patience is never forced on you at the wrong moment.
INDIVIDUAL BOND STRATEGIES: A bond fund never matures. An individual bond does. Owning bonds directly, often in a ladder with maturities spread over time, means you know what you'll receive and when, which makes it easier to match money to the moments you'll need it. It also gives us more control over taxes, particularly with municipal bonds, and over when gains or losses are realized. For larger fixed income allocations, that precision is worth it. For smaller ones, a fund's diversification usually wins.
None of this replaces the foundation. It sits on top of it.
OUR SUBSTANCE.
The style is the easy part to explain. The substance is whether we, and you, stay with it.
Consider Dimensional's own start. The firm launched in 1981 on the premise that smaller companies would outpace larger ones over time. Then, for roughly its first nine years, small caps lagged the broader market. Imagine pitching that at a dinner party.
Asness has made the same point with characteristic bluntness. A brilliant strategy you abandon at the worst moment, he argues, is worth far less than a very good one you can actually live with. He once said he used to think long-term investing success was about genius. Now he thinks it's mostly about "doing something reasonable, that makes sense, and then sticking to it with incredible fortitude."
"Doing something reasonable, that makes sense, and then sticking to it with incredible fortitude."Cliff Asness, Co-Founder, AQR Captial Management
He has also borrowed a line from Kipling that belongs on every investor's wall: to meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.
THE NOISE IS GETTING LOUDER
In 2024, Asness published a paper called The Less-Efficient Market Hypothesis, a playful jab at his old professor's life's work. His argument is that markets have become less rational over his career, and his leading suspect is social media and gamified trading. He asks whether there has ever been a better tool for turning a wise crowd into "a co-ordinated, clueless, even dangerous mob."
Having spent seven years off Facebook, a story I told in What I Learned By Logging Off this past August, I'll just say I'm not shocked.
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What We Own
An evidence-based core, purposeful satellites and a diversified defense, built on when a client's situation calls for it.
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Why We Own It
Each holding is backed by research and has a defined job. Nothing is there on a hunch.
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How We Stay
Fixed targets, built-in rebalancing, and conversations before the noise, not after.
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November also brings the midterms, and with them a fresh supply of predictions about what the outcome means for your portfolio. Booth's view, after half a century of watching markets, is that over long periods you can't find much connection between which party is in power and how stocks behave. That isn't a political statement. It's a reminder that the plan you built in calm month should still be the plan in a loud one.
Plenty of "investing" is all sizzle, no steak. I spent my early years in restaurants, and I learned you can sell the sizzle once. People come back for the steak. We'd rather be the steak.
Chris Benda, Founder, Benda & Co.
Sources:
Eugene F. Fama, quoted in “How the Really Smart Money Invests,” Fortune, July 6, 1998. https://business.baylor.edu/don_cunningham/How%20the%20Really%20Smart%20Money%20Invests%20(1998).pdf Scalable Capital, “The 10 Grand Masters of the Market.” https://it.scalable.capital/en/finances-stock-market/the-10-grand-masters-of-the-market-who-they-are-how-they-invest
University of Chicago, 2014 Annual Report, profile of Eugene F. Fama. https://annualreport2014.uchicago.edu/?p=792
Hoover Institution, “The Efficient Markets Hypothesis and Modern Finance with Nobel Prize Winner Eugene Fama.” https://www.hoover.org/research/efficient-markets-hypothesis-and-modern-finance-nobel-prize-winner-eugene-fama Chicago Booth Magazine, “Eugene Fama and David Booth: A Fireside Chat.” https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/eugene-fama-david-booth-fireside-chat
Institutional Investor, “David Booth Brings Academic Research to Life.” https://institutionalinvestor.com/article/b14z9r03wpmzn3/david-booth-brings-academic-research-to-life
Chicago Booth Magazine, “Eugene Fama and David Booth: A Fireside Chat.” https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/eugene-fama-david-booth-fireside-chat
Wharton Magazine, “The Long and the Short of It,” Fall 2006. https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/fall-2006/the-long-and-the-short-of-it/
University of Chicago Booth School of Business, “Clifford S. Asness, MBA ’91, PhD ’94,” Distinguished Alumni Awards. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/alumni/distinguished-alumni-award/honorees/clifford-asness
Dimensional Fund Advisors, “Tune Out the Noise: New Film Directed by Errol Morris Debuts on YouTube.” https://www.dimensional.com/ie-en/newsroom/tune-out-the-noise-new-film-directed-by-errol-morris-debuts-on-youtube The Wall Street Journal, “A Billionaire and an Oscar Winner Have Made a Hit Movie. It’s About Investing,” reprinted by Dimensional. https://www.dimensional.com/ca-en/newsroom/the-wall-street-journal-a-billionaire-and-an-oscar-winner-have-made-a-hit-movie-its-about-investing
Fortune, “How Bad Was 2022 for Stocks, Markets and Bonds,” December 31, 2022. https://fortune.com/2022/12/31/how-bad-was-2022-for-stocks-markets-bonds-worst-since-great-financial-crisis The Motley Fool, January 26, 2023. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/01/26/2022-was-the-worst-year-since-1937-for-this-invest
Kitces.com. https://www.kitces.com/?p=54992 Charles Schwab, “Tax Advantages and Risks of Direct Indexing.” https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/tax-advantages-and-risks-direct-indexing
Alpha Architect, “Tax-Loss Harvesting.” https://alphaarchitect.com/tax-loss-harvesting/
EQT, “Why Is the Stock Market Shrinking?” https://eqtgroup.com/thinq/equity/why-is-the-stock-market-shrinking Sherwood News, “The Number of Public Companies Has Fallen Fast.” https://www.sherwood.news/markets/the-number-of-public-companies-has-fallen-fast/
Institutional Investor, “Cliff Asness Questions Whether Investors in Private Equity Are Being Rewarded or Penalized for Taking Illiquidity Risk.” https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bstolqfnrubgold0lkow/portfolio/cliff-asness-questions-whether-investors-in-private-equity-are-being-rewarded-or-penalized-for-taking-illiquidity-risk Alpha Architect, “Volatility Laundering.” https://alphaarchitect.com/volatility-laundering/
Institutional Investor, ibid. AQR Capital Management, “Interview with Cliff Asness,” Journal of Private Markets Investing, Spring 2026. https://www.aqr.com/-/media/AQR/Documents/Journal-Articles/Interview-with-Cliff-Asness-Journal-of-Private-Markets-Investing--Spring-2026.pdf?sc_lang=en Morningstar, “How Private Equity Funds Understate the Risk of Their Investments.” https://www.morningstar.com/alternative-investments/how-private-equity-funds-understate-risk-their-investments
ThinkAdvisor, “Bond Ladders vs. Bond Funds: Which Are Best for Portfolios?” February 10, 2023. https://thinkadvisor.com/2023/02/10/bond-ladders-vs-bond-funds-which-are-best-for-portfolios A Wealth of Common Sense, “How Does a Bond Ladder Work?” April 2026. https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2026/04/how-does-a-bond-ladder-work/ Vanguard, “Bonds vs. Bond Funds.” https://advisors.vanguard.com/strategies/fixed-income/bonds-vs-bond-funds.html
David Booth, letter to investors, May 2017, as summarized by The Evidence-Based Investor. https://www.evidenceinvestor.com/?p=5611
Cliff Asness on Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz (2015), as summarized in A Wealth of Common Sense, “From Great to Good,” February 2015. https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2015/02/from-great-to-good/
Cliff Asness, Bloomberg TV interview, via The Reformed Broker. https://thereformedbroker.com/?p=64173
Rudyard Kipling, “If—” (1910). Christine Idzelis, “AQR’s Cliff Asness Told You Bad Times Were Coming,” Institutional Investor, July 2, 2019. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1g3d0qd1bl12b/AQR-s-Cliff-Asness-Told-You-Bad-Times-Were-Coming
Clifford S. Asness, “The Less-Efficient Market Hypothesis,” Journal of Portfolio Management, 2024. Advisor Perspectives, September 3, 2024. https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2024/09/03/cliff-asness-old-man-whinging-markets-less-efficient The Irish Times, “Is Social Media Keeping Stock Prices Crazy for Longer?” September 17, 2024. https://www.irishtimes.com/your-money/2024/09/17/is-social-media-keeping-stock-prices-crazy-for-longer/
David Booth, interview with Yahoo Finance, 2025, via AOL. https://www.aol.com/finance/billionaire-investor-david-booth-long-173005610.html
Chris Benda is an investment adviser representative with Savvy Advisors, Inc. (“Savvy Advisors”). Savvy Advisors is an SEC registered investment advisor. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the speakers and authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Savvy Advisors. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but are not assured as to accuracy.
Material prepared herein has been created for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation. Information was obtained from sources believed to be reliable but was not verified for accuracy.Savvy Wealth Inc. is a technology company. Savvy Advisors, Inc. is an SEC registered investment advisor. For purposes of this article, Savvy Wealth and Savvy Advisors together are referred to as “Savvy”. All advisory services are offered through Savvy Advisors, while technology is offered through Savvy Wealth. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the speakers and authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Savvy Advisors.
