This is a great article about DFA Funds
DFA Funds Hard to Buy, Easy to Own
By Timothy Middleton
CNBC on MSN
June 2002
Call Dimensional Fund Advisors the anti-Long Term Capital Management .
The latter is the professor – run hedge fund that imploded because the risks it was trying to avoid bit it in the backside. DFA, likewise run by a coven of finance professors, doesn’t avoid risk—it relishes it .
And that’s produced an excellent long- term performance record, which, alas, most individual investors can’t take advantage of. DFA funds are sold only through fee-only financial planners—and then only when DFA agrees to accept their business.
“I can’t stand their attitude! ” grouses a planner whom DFA turned down. “They’ve got great funds, and a great discipline, lots of deep thinking, but they’ve got an attitude.”
Before Harold Evensky, a well-known planner, was allowed to invest in DFA funds, he had to t rek to seminars it sponsors at places such as the University of Chicago. “I remember way back when they told me you had to be approved that I was incensed,” he says. “But it’s not elitist criteria they’re pushing; it’s professional criteria.”
Today, DFA funds account for as much as 40% of a typical client’s equity port folio at Evensky, Brown & Katz, headquartered in Coral Gables, Fla. DFA is run on principles developed in the nation’s graduate schools of ….
Read the complete article here http://www.indexvalue.com/Hard%20to%20Buy%20Easy%20to%20Own.PDF