Systematic Investing, Mission, and the Discipline of Expectations — with Eduardo Repetto | Treussard Talks (E25)

Eduardo Repetto is the Chief Investment Officer of Avantis Investors, the systematic investment firm he founded in 2019 that now manages more than $125 billion. Before Avantis, Eduardo was Co-CEO and Co-CIO at Dimensional Fund Advisors, where he worked alongside Eugene Fama and Ken French. He holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics from Caltech. The history of investing has been a slow march from artisanal to systematic. Markowitz gave us the framework. Fama and French gave us the factors. The toolkit Eduardo has spent his career building is what happens when those ideas get implemented at scale — broadly diversified, daily-managed, transparent, and priced to respect the investor. In the industry, we sometimes call it "core and bore." The "bore" is the point. We also talk about ownership. Avantis sits inside American Century, whose controlling shareholder is the Stowers Institute for Medical Research — an endowment built from the donated shares of a cancer-survivor founder, funding fundamental research that grant cycles rarely sustain. Eduardo describes it as "taking one for society." And we get into discipline. Liquid wrappers around illiquid assets. Thematic ETFs that turn out to hold the Magnificent Seven in disguise. The behavioral pull to bail in a drawdown. Eduardo's framing — build the expectation of volatility into the journey the way a traveler builds in traffic on the way to the airport — is the kind of anchor a client can actually hold on to in a hard moment. Eduardo is unhurried, undramatic, and uninterested in selling you on a person. He believes in the process, not in himself. You'll hear us cover: Why STEM training is really about building mental models — for markets, for marketing, for any problem worth solving The arc from Markowitz to CAPM to the Fama-French factor model, and why "anomalies" are only anomalies if you treat the original framework as gospel Why factor investing belongs in the middle ground between passive and active — and why "core and bore" is the ambition, not a consolation prize The Stowers Institute and American Century: how mission-aligned ownership funds long-horizon medical research in a way the grant system structurally cannot Why thematic ETFs with "the future of" in the title are often back-test engineering dressed as investing What happens when shareholders ask for their money back from a fund holding mostly illiquid assets — and why this is mechanics, not bad luck The plane versus the bicycle: knowing yourself, knowing what you're trying to accomplish, and matching the vehicle to the destination If this conversation is useful to you, the next step is the Wealth, Empowered newsletter — free, published every two weeks, written for people who want to think seriously about markets and wealth without the noise. Subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com. Disclaimer: The content of Treussard Talks is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com. Newsletter — Wealth, Empowered: https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/ Website: https://www.treussard.com/