A 2016 Call to Action for the Evidence-Based Advisors Group

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Evidence-Based AdvisorsCalling All Evidence-Based Advisors!

If you’ve not yet heard about it, a small team of us has been maintaining an Evidence-Based Advisors (EBA) LinkedIn group since 2008. What began as a modest adventure has grown to a list of 1,500+ members, with new join requests coming in weekly.

The majority of members are evidence-based advisors, just as the name implies. There also are a scattering of service providers like yours truly; fund manager representatives from firms such as Dimensional, AQR and Bridgeway; and some academics who have expressed interest in participating in meaningful conversations (versus using the forum as a promotional venue). Advisors from the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and a number of other countries are represented in the group. Just this morning, we accepted a join request from an advisor based in Santiago, Chile. Bienvenida!

That’s the good news. Unfortunately, as LinkedIn has evolved, discussions and engagements have been sparse lately in our group. That’s a bummer, but with so many like-minded members who share a common commitment to advancing evidence-based investing around the globe, I’d like to think that we’ve still got great potential.

A few months ago, I agreed to begin managing the EBA group, so that its advisor firm founders could take a well-deserved break from their multi-year, volunteer role. In 2016, I’d like to explore how evidence-based advisors could make best use of our growing group. Here are a few ideas with which to prime the pump:

  • We’ve got some impressively credentialed members here; we could sponsor member-only events tapping into your collective expertise.
  • We could become a unified resource that the media could turn to for insights on evidence-based investing.
  • We could see about obtaining group discounts for services of common interest.
  • We could … What are YOUR ideas?

As an essential first step, I would like to identify a core group of EBA members who are interested in helping us identify AND implement the most promising possibilities for turning this group into something important and useful to all of us. Next, we hope to survey the group and find out what’s of most interest among the many possibilities we could pursue.

Many evidence-based hands could make the work light and the results spectacular. Are you in? Let me know. If you’re not yet an EBA member and would like to join, send a request of your own at your earliest convenience. We look forward to welcoming you aboard.