“We argue there are clearly some things related to differences in expected returns,” Smart says. “If you build a portfolio around those things, we feel you can expect to earn a premium over a market-cap-weighted benchmark.”

At DFA, Smart manages several U.S. large-cap equity funds and REIT portfolios as part of a team of investment professionals. Many of those portfolios consistently outperform their benchmarks. Those funds include the $6 billion DFA U.S. Large Company I fund, the $2.7 billion DFA U.S. Large Cap Value III portfolio and the $14.4 billion DFA U.S. Large Cap Value Portfolio.

The DFA Large Cap Value Portfolio’s top holdings include AT&T, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, Comcast and Pfizer. While institutional shares of the fund are down more than 10 percent year over year, the fund boasts three-year annualized returns of 9.6 percent and five-year returns of 9.0 percent.

Smart also contributes his portfolio management expertise to a suite of six multi-factor ETFs launched last year by John Hancock and managed by DFA.

Smart has spent 15 years in the financial services industry. Before joining Dimensional in 2007, he did consulting work for Bank of America in Chicago, and was also a consultant and a portfolio manager for Ibbotson Associates.

Smart became involved in the financial services industry while an undergraduate at the University of San Diego.

“I went into my undergraduate years majoring in English of all things, but my faculty advisor was a professor in economics,” Smart says. “He showed me a lot of fascinating stuff, and I kind of fell down the rabbit hole.”

That relationship drove him into an MBA program at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

The Ibbotson connection brought him to Dimensional Fund Advisors -- Yale University professor Roger Ibbotson also sits on the firm’s board of directors.

“We don’t believe you can time the market, so the only reasonable course of action is to remain fully invested,” Smart says, and the key is selecting the right investments. That’s why Dimensional’s fund managers look at companies in the context of multiple dimensions.