About these summaries
Octagon has summarized 40 episodes of The Rational Reminder Podcast published between Jan 1, 2026 and Sep 24, 2026. The companies discussed most often are PWL Capital, Avantis and Avantis Investors. Frequent guests include Shelly Antoniewicz and Tim Edwards. Each summary lists key takeaways, short timestamped quotes and the companies and tickers mentioned, with a link to the full episode.
Most-mentioned companies
- PWL Capital 15
- Avantis 2
- Avantis Investors 2
- Dimensional 2
- Dimensional Fund Advisors 2
- S&P Dow Jones Indices 2
Frequent guests
- Shelly Antoniewicz 2
- Tim Edwards 2
Episodes
- Wealthy People Are Hiding in Plain Sight (ft. Owen Zidar) | Rational Reminder 428
Owen Zidar argues that most wealthy Americans are not celebrity founders or Wall Street financiers, but ordinary business owners in unglamorous industries such as auto repair…
- What to Know Before (and After) You Hire an Advisor (with Matthew Taylor) | Rational Reminder 427
Matthew Taylor argues that most successful negligence claims against financial advisers hinge on proof of suitability failures, not just bad outcomes.
- The Finances of Marriage | Rational Reminder 426
The episode argues that marriage is a financial contract as much as a personal commitment, and that compatibility around money can shape both relationship quality and long-run…
- The Ethics Problem in Financial Services (Dr. Moira Somers & Philippa Hann) | Rational Reminder 425
Philippa Hann and Dr. Moira Somers argue that financial misconduct is usually not a simple story of villains versus saints.
- 50 Years of Evidence-Based Investing (with David Booth) | Rational Reminder 424
David Booth makes the case that the last 50 years of evidence-based investing turned market uncertainty from something to fear into something to understand and use.
- The Future of AI in the Workplace | Special Episode (Mike Sullivan and Vinay Gidwaney)
The episode argues that AI should be treated as a tool for amplifying people, not just a mechanism for cutting headcount.
- The Biggest Myths in Personal Finance | Rational Reminder 423
The episode argues that many popular personal finance rules are directionally useful but misleading when treated as absolutes.
- Bill Bernstein: The Money Decisions That Actually Matter | Rational Reminder 422
William Bernstein frames Jonathan Clements’ final book as a practical guide to the money decisions that matter most: spending, saving, retirement, inheritance, and how people…
- Barry Ritholtz: How Not to Invest | Rational Reminder 421
Barry Ritholtz argues that most investing errors come from overconfidence, bad information, and a refusal to think probabilistically.
- Answering Your Financial Questions | Rational Reminder 420
The episode opens with a discussion of how to become a better financial planner early in a career.
- Jean-Pierre Aubry: The State of Retirement Research | Rational Reminder 419
Jean-Pierre Aubry argues that retirement investing is shaped less by pure household preference than by defaults, advice, and institutional design.
- "I Sold 50% of My Portfolio. What Now?" (AMA 17) | Rational Reminder 418
The episode opens with a detailed case of an investor who sold VEQT for cash on bubble fears and now wants back in.
- Dr. Paul Kaplan: A Financial Plan For Your Entire Life | Rational Reminder 417
Paul Kaplan argues that life cycle finance should replace disconnected retirement rules with a single framework for lifetime decisions.
- Is VEQT Costing You? (& Other Questions) | Rational Reminder 416
The episode opens with a practical comparison between buying an all-in-one ETF like VEQT and assembling the four underlying ETFs separately.
- Shannon Lee Simmons: How To Stop Feeling Broke | Rational Reminder 415
Shannon Lee Simmons argues that a lot of “feeling broke” is emotional rather than numerical: people can have good incomes and still feel unable to build the life they want.
- Answering Your Financial Questions | Rational Reminder 414
The episode is an AMA focused on practical investing and planning questions rather than market news.
- Morley Conn: How Canadian ETFs Actually Work | Rational Reminder 413
The conversation explains how Canadian ETFs actually work behind the scenes, from creation and redemption to market making, block trading, and the roles of issuers, custodians…
- Ben Carlson: Investing at All-Time Highs | Rational Reminder 412
Ben Carlson argues that investing at all-time highs is usually not a warning sign in itself: historically, returns have often been better after buying near highs than on random…
- Market Simulations & Financial Planning (With John Yang) | Rational Reminder 411
The episode focuses on how expected return assumptions shape retirement projections, portfolio construction, and financial advice, and why PWL Capital thinks the details matter…
- Shelly Antoniewicz: The State of Investing in 2026 | Rational Reminder 410
Shelly Antoniewicz argues that regulated funds remain a huge and important conduit for capital allocation, with global regulated fund assets at 88 trillion out of 313 trillion in…
- Ex-Investment Banker: What Private Equity Doesn't Tell You
Jeff Hooke argues that private equity, private credit, and related alternatives are mostly sold on hype, career incentives, and difficult-to-verify performance claims rather than…
- Elroy Dimson: Investing & Optimism | Rational Reminder 408
Elroy Dimson argues that the only sensible way to think about future returns is to study long-run financial history, because markets are shaped by survivorship bias, missing…
- Michael Kothakota: The Shape of Financial Planning | Rational Reminder 407
Michael Kothakota argues that financial planning needs a model built around interdependence, not isolated product decisions.
- When Massive Private Companies Go Public | Rational Reminder 406
Massive private-company IPOs like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could force index funds to buy newly public stocks that may be richly valued and prone to weak post-IPO returns.
- Timothy Edwards: Inside S&P DJ Indices | Rational Reminder 405
The discussion centers on the SPIVA scorecard, S&P Dow Jones Indices’ long-running comparison of active and passive investing.
- The Finance Paper that Changed Everything | Rational Reminder 404
The hosts trace why Fama and French’s 1993 paper became a turning point in asset pricing: it showed that market beta alone could not explain cross-sectional stock returns, and…
- Patrick Adams: When Stock Crashes Matter for Long-Term Investors | Rational Reminder 403
Patrick Adams argues that the familiar “stocks for the long run” story breaks down once you account for real-world liquidity needs.
- The Problem with Private Markets | Rational Reminder 402
Private markets were presented as a lower-volatility, higher-return alternative to public investing, but the episode argues that the appeal is often driven by valuation opacity…
- Eduardo Repetto & Caitlin Ebanks: Opening the Avantis CAGE | Rational Reminder 401
Avantis is bringing a Canadian ETF lineup through CIBC that closely mirrors its U.S. factor-investing approach, with Canadian wrappers, direct security ownership, and low turnover.
- The Evolution of Index Fund Investing | Rational Reminder 400
The episode frames 50 years of index investing as a story of both market access and market structure.
- James Choi: Portfolio Theory in a Spreadsheet | Rational Reminder 399
James Choi explains the life-cycle portfolio choice problem as deciding how much of total wealth should be in stocks versus bonds once human capital is included.
- Tom Hardin: Ethics, Financial Crime, and Redemption | Rational Reminder 398
Tom Hardin, known as Tipper X, explains how he went from a rule-following kid in Georgia to a hedge fund analyst who crossed into insider trading, made four illegal trades, and…
- Hendrik Bessembinder: Constant Leverage & Measuring Investor Outcomes | Rational Reminder 397
Hendrik Bessembinder argues that “volatility decay” is an imprecise label for what happens in constant-leverage ETFs.
- Theresa Ebden: Protecting Investors at the OSC | Rational Reminder 396
Theresa Ebden, vice president of the Investor Office at the Ontario Securities Commission, explains that the OSC’s job is not just rulemaking and enforcement but also investor…
- Charles Chaffin: The Psychology of Financial Planning | Rational Reminder 395
Charles Chaffin argues that financial planning is as much about psychology as technical advice because people do not act like fully rational optimizers.
- Equal Weight vs. Market Cap Weight Index Funds | Rational Reminder 394
Equal-weighted index funds are presented as an appealing answer to today’s worries about market concentration and rich valuations, but the episode argues they are really a…
- Engineering Financial Outcomes | Rational Reminder 393
The discussion reframes financial planning as a design problem: the plan is the set of decisions made today, while the projection is only the modeling used to support those…
- The Rise of ETF Slop | Rational Reminder 392
The episode argues that ETFs have moved far beyond simple, low-cost index funds into a crowded market of high-fee, behaviorally targeted products the hosts call “ETF slop.” They…
- How Assumptions Shape Financial Planning Outcomes | Rational Reminder 391
The episode argues that financial planning is really a question of how assumptions are chosen, stress-tested, and explained, because those assumptions shape both the numbers and…
- The "AI Bubble" and Stock Market Concentration | Rational Reminder 390
The episode argues that the bigger issue in today’s U.S. market is elevated valuation, not concentration by itself.
The Rational Reminder Podcast, its episodes and artwork belong to Benjamin Felix, Cameron Passmore, and Dan Bortolotti. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; these pages are independent summaries.
