A conversation with Dimensional Fund Advisors' founder. September 13, 2026 Good morning and happy Sunday. The asset management industry has come a long way since Dimensional Fund Advisors was founded by a small team of academics at the University of Chicago. But first, a message from the Advisor Upside team. The RIA M&A train just keeps on rollin’. On September 2, Sequoia Financial Group and Allworth Financial announced acquisitions totaling nearly $3.3 billion in client assets. And it wasn’t all big-game hunting, with Allworth snapping up an Indianapolis-based practice managing $282 million. Among consolidators, over 40% of H1 2026 deals were for firms under $500 million. 1 At this pace, a buyer could price your practice before you do, so it’s better to know your number now before someone in a quarter-zip buys you lunch and makes an offer. A rough multiple of AUM doesn’t always get you there, since much of the value rides on whether the revenue stays put after a sale. So we built a free valuation calculator , in partnership with Diamond Consultants , weighing the same considerations, like your fee-based revenue share, how much rides on your top 10 clients, and whether you run solo or ensemble. See what your practice could be worth. INVESTING STRATEGIES Dimensional’s David Booth Discusses the State of ETFs, Investing and More Photo via Dimensional Fund Advisors He doesn’t get as much media attention as Larry Fink or Bill Ackman, but David Booth, chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, has played a foundational role in the creation of the modern asset management industry. Working alongside Rex Sinquefield since the early 1980s, Booth has championed the idea that academic research is superior to Wall Street intuition. During that time, Dimensional has grown from a fledgling business operating out of a spare room of Booth’s Brooklyn brownstone to a global investment manager with $1.1 trillion in assets under management. He’s no longer running the company, having passed the reins to current co-CEOs Dave Butler and Gerard O’Reilly, but Booth is still intimately involved in setting Dimensional’s direction at a time when innovation in the exchange-traded fund market and related trends are driving another sea change in how professional portfolios are built. We sat down with Booth at Nasdaq’s headquarters in New York (a fitting location given the important historical links between the firms) to get his take on a number of hot topics affecting financial advisors and their clients today. Dimensional’s foundation story and growth were the subject of a feature film funded by the firm and published last year by the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Does it surprise you that the film has notched more than 32 million views on YouTube? Yeah, that’s really something. It’s gratifying, because our goal with the movie was also about helping more people better understand the financial markets, asset managers and how investing actually works. If they do, then they’ll feel better about participating in the market and will be better able to meet their long-term objectives, so reaching that many people was fantastic. How are you thinking about innovation in the ETF market today? ETFs have been a big part of Dimensional’s run to $1 trillion. Where’s the market heading? Should mutual fund managers be worried? Neither is inherently superior, mutual funds or ETFs, but it’s undeniable that ETFs have some big advantages, starting with the tax efficiency, and the proliferation of active products has just been huge in recent years. So yes, you are seeing tremendous growth on the ETF side and I expect that will continue. The proliferation of ETF share classes is something we’ve been intimately involved in. Vanguard got the permission to do it, I don’t know, 30 years ago, but the SEC hadn’t permitted others to go down that route [Editor’s note: Vanguard’s patent on the ETF share class expired in 2023]. We thought that was a disservice to investors, so we petitioned the SEC for permission and we told everyone what we were doing. Well, something like 80 firms lined up behind us and the regulators decided to open this up last year. That’s a great thing for investors. Another one, and it’s related, is mutual fund conversions to ETFs, where we’ve also been at the forefront. Between conversions and launches, we’re now a top active ETF manager. It’s a lot of innovation, and that’s going to continue here and across the asset management industry. Do you get the sense that ETF innovation might be getting ahead of itself when you see the pace of filings for so many things that are made to be traded intraday and not held for longer? ETFs are increasingly being developed with themes akin to gambling. Personally, I’ve never really thought that leverage was necessary for long-term investors. In my 57 years in this business, if there’s one common theme to all the bankruptcies and catastrophes that’ve come up, it’s leverage of some form. Now, I think there’s nothing wrong with leverage, per se, but it has to be reasonable and managed carefully. I hope investors getting into these products understand that. Some of them, I imagine, do enjoy the gambling aspect here. For these people, a small exposure to products they understand is probably fine, but it’s certainly not for everyone. What about the question of broader participation in the private markets? There has been a big push by some asset managers in that direction, but the jury’s still out on retail investor demand. We could spend a whole conversation on just that topic. But to keep it simple, I would just turn back to where we started. A lot of what we’re trying to do at Dimensional in our collaboration with fiduciary financial advisors is getting more people to invest at all. There are still a lot of people out there that simply don’t fully or even partially participate in the stock market. To think about getting novice investors, and even more experienced inves

Can office-to-residential conversions solve America’s housing shortage? September 13, 2026 PRESENTED BY NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL Good morning and happy Sunday. After years of permitting, zoning and development, the COVID-era dream of converting America’s newly empty office space into livable housing is finally becoming a reality, with a large wave of conversions reaching the market this year. But are the extreme office makeovers truly a solution to the housing shortage synonymous with city life today? Before we dive in, a word from our sponsor, Northwestern Mutual . After weeks of scrolling listings and shaking hands with real estate agents, you’ve found your ideal home. Good natural light, a spacious yard, an offer at asking price. At this stage, it’s easy to overlook the costs beyond the sticker price: Private mortgage insurance, a recurring bill until your equity clears 20%. Property taxes that swing by thousands depending on the zip code. Maintenance, roughly 1% of your home’s value a year (and that’s a good year). That’s a lot of line items for one purchase. But with the right support , you can get ahead of the game. For almost 170 years, Northwestern Mutual has helped clients grow and protect their money to reach milestones like this. Your advisor builds a personalized plan around your goals and uncovers both blind spots and new opportunities , so you’re ready for anything unexpected before you sign. See how that plan comes together with Northwestern Mutual. * REAL ESTATE Post-Pandemic, ‘Living at the Office’ Takes on New (and Lucrative) Meaning Photo illustration by Connor Lin / The Daily Upside Before the COVID pandemic, millions of Americans griped about living at the office. It was an exxageration, though not necessarily much of one. Now, in a growing number of cities, they have a chance to do so for real, 24 hours a day with all the comforts of (an urban) home, rather than the mere 12 to 16 that might have been common circa 2019. After years of powering through lengthy permitting and zoning processes, followed by complicated construction projects, developers are beginning to manifest at scale the post-pandemic dream of turning empty offices and cubicles in once-bustling professional districts into apartments and condos. This week, for instance, marked the completion of the very first office-to-residential (OTR) conversion in Chicago’s downtown Loop financial district, bringing 117 new apartment units to the area. Five more buildings have already been earmarked for a similar makeover. Meanwhile, 38% of all new housing units in New York City are the product of conversion projects this year, according to a recent analysis of city data by The New York Times , nearly doubling the pace set the previous year and well above the single-digit pre-pandemic norm. Backers hope such conversions will make a dent in the twin 21st-century crises of urban real estate: a glut of office buildings due in large part to the rise of remote work, and a shortage of housing due to a decades-long failure to construct new residential buildings. Solving the problem altogether is another matter, however. Experts told The Daily Upside that the relative gold rush may soon come to an end, as cities simply run out of viable conversion candidates. “A pattern we’re seeing is that the market is conflating ‘vacant’ with ‘convertible,’” Chris Mitchell, senior banking official at Northern Trust Wealth Management, told The Daily Upside. “In reality, structural constraints and capital requirements narrow the pool to a fraction of total inventory. Even when conversions are possible, they’re highly selective.” The Urban Circle of Life While the office-to-residential conversion rush is real, it is hardly a new concept. Particularly in New York City, it’s practically a part of any block’s natural life cycle. The 1980s delivered a generational office-building boom, capped by a recession that prompted city officials to encourage conversions via a tax incentive program in the 1990s. A short decade later, the global financial crisis prompted another round of office space rethinks. “I often joke around that we were doing conversions before it was the cool thing to do,” Spencer Levine, president of NYC-based residential real estate developer RAL Companies, told The Daily Upside of the company’s decades-long history of conversion projects. The energy driving such projects is different today than in the late 1990s and early 2000s, however. Now, “it is a quantity game,” Levine said. “A lot of the conversions that are taking place now are about how many units can we fit in a building, rather than what is the quality of life or quality of unit that is being provided.” The Big Short COVID changed office culture, maybe forever. Whether JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon likes it or not, remote work is seemingly here to stay and has arrived at an equilibrium in recent years. About 26% of paid, full-time workdays in the US were completed from home in July, according to a monthly survey run by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis. That figure is down from a peak of about 30% in 2022, but has held nearly constant for two years and is well above the 7% norm recorded pre-pandemic. Conversely, office occupancy rates remain sharply lower than in pre-covid days. The vacancy rate across 79 mostly urban US markets reached a record 21% earlier this year, according to Moody’s data , well above the pre-pandemic norm of about 16%. As a result, building owners have seen property values swoon. One tower in Chicago’s Loop district sold for $4.2 million in October of last year, well down from the $68 million it last sold for in 2016, according to CoStar data . A 23-story office building at 135 West 50th Street in midtown Manhattan that sold for $332 million in 2006 brought in just $8.5 million in 2024. The industry may still be finding its bottom. In the first two months of the year, sales of distressed office buildings reached $808 mill

Spicy Take Sunday 🌶️ 🥛 'BTC is the purest AI trade' 💅 Spicy Take Sunday 🌶️ Chevy Cassar GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that comes in hotter than a maxi defending their bags on Twitter. Here’s a taste of this week’s menu: 🔥 BTC is the purest AI trade you can buy. 🥵 Crypto OGs are annoyed that BTC got too corporate. 🌶️ Stock certificates are truly archaic. 2022 killed crypto lending. Nexo survived - and is now the 3rd-largest crypto lender in the world. We asked their US COO how. Watch here . HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥 Bitcoin is the purest AI trade you can buy 🤖 Jordi Visser (Founder of Visser Labs) says everyone keeps framing the AI trade as Nvidia and Micron, but he sees it differently. He's been calling Bitcoin "the purest AI trade" for over a year, arguing that billions of AI agents are useless without financial rails to actually transact on, and that's exactly the role crypto fills. Jordi thinks that thesis just hit its trigger point: The biggest short squeeze in crypto history added $500B to the crypto market cap in a matter of days, and he's now calling for the entire space to hit $50T to $100T within five years. He's not ignoring the memecoin frenzy on Robinhood chain either, seeing it as the same retail energy that shows up right before institutions pile in. 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here . Crypto OGs are annoyed that Bitcoin got too corporate 🏦 Katie Talati (Head of Research at Arca) says there's a real split forming in crypto right now. The people who got in early are watching Bitcoin go from a cyberpunk outsider asset to something BlackRock talks about on CNBC every day, and a lot of them hate it. Katie thinks that discomfort is part of what's fueling renewed interest in privacy coins like Zcash, since some of that original community just wants an asset that still feels private and uninstitutionalized. 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here . Stock certificates are truly archaic 📜 Carlos Domingo (Founder & CEO of Securitize) has run his company for almost nine years without ever holding a physical share certificate for it. Instead, his own stock trades onchain on Solana, through the same rails Securitize built for everyone else. The company is now a licensed transfer agent, broker dealer and RIA, partnered with the two biggest transfer agents in the U.S. plus the New York Stock Exchange on 24/7 trading of tokenized equities. Carlos calls this "the end of the beginning" for tokenization, and he's betting the next phase is consolidation, since a bare tokenization platform without that full licensing stack behind it won't survive what's coming. 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here . NOBODY WANTS TO SELL THEIR CRYPTO 🏦 Selling crypto triggers a tax bill. Borrowing against it doesn't. That's why crypto lending is booming again… and why Nexo is now the third-largest crypto lender in the world. We sat down with Neil Steinhardt, COO of Nexo US, to talk: Why borrowers are choosing credit over selling How Nexo got back into the U.S. (Bakkt, RIAs & the GENIUS Act) What kept them alive when Celsius, BlockFi, and Genesis didn't Where the market goes next - and the M&A wave nobody's positioned for 👉 Watch the full episode here! HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥 The AI layoffs are already happening, you just can't see them yet 👻 Martin Toman (Lead Analyst at Milk Road) says the AI job-loss story won’t show up as dramatic layoff headlines, at least not yet. He thinks it’s happening, but only underneath the surface for now. Companies at the AI frontier are hiring aggressively and eating market share from slower competitors, but those older companies won’t die overnight, they’ll just bleed out over the next few years. Martin thinks the real wave of visible layoffs only hits once money gets scarce again, when higher rates finally force companies to tighten up. 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here . The market hasn't caught up to what's actually happening in memory 🧠 Vincent (Lead AI Researcher, Milk Road) points to Micron's valuation as proof the market hasn't caught up to what's actually happening in memory. Despite locking in long-term supply contracts with floor pricing, Micron's forward P/E sits somewhere between 6 and 12, a bear-market multiple for a company sitting at the center of an AI memory shortage. Vincent's view is that investors have PTSD from the last memory boom-and-bust cycle and are pricing in a crash that these new long-term, floor-priced contracts with Samsung and others were specifically designed to prevent. The way he sees it: Micron is no longer cyclical, it's a structurally repriced bet the market just hasn't caught up to yet. 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here . BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪 Free seminar on blockchain and private markets. Our PRO analyst, Martin, is joining a live webinar to discuss where VC money is flowing. Register for free here .* Question: If you had $10k to invest ANYWHERE right now, where would you put it? Wholesale inflation is up: PPI reaccelerated in August, year-on-year we're at +5.4%. Jordi Visser: "When you get all mad and say this house of cards is going to crumble down... it's not. The governments can't allow it to." *this is sponsored content. 👉 Watch the full episode here! RATE TODAY’S EDITION What'd you think of today's edition? 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛 F**king great 🥛🥛🥛 Meh, do better 🥛 You didn't bring the heat MILKY MEMES 🤣 Source: @ToolySOL Source: @ToolySOL This content is for educational purposes only. Read full disclaimer Interested in reaching smart readers like you? 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The plumbing works, now what? 📉 The value gap Stellar Q2 token holder report Blockworks finds that Stellar had its strongest quarter of institutional adoption to date, with tokenized RWAs doubling to $3 billion, payment volume rising 68.8% to $16.43 billion and DTCC selecting the network for tokenized securities trials. Stellar is also evolving beyond payments, with Soroban smart contracts now generating 94.4% of network fees and 82.4% of onchain trading volume. However, network adoption does not translate directly into value accrual for XLM. Fees remain minimal, are neither burned nor distributed, and circulating supply increased 2.8% during the quarter. Growth also remains concentrated, with four issuers holding 92.5% of tokenized assets, making issuer diversification and DTCC’s implementation key milestones to watch. The Einstein generation of DeFi Rakka from Omnipair published a piece arguing that DeFi’s current shortcomings should be treated as unsolved design problems rather than fundamental limits. Drawing an analogy to physics before Einstein, he argues that problems like AMM adverse selection, lending tradeoffs, and fragmented liquidity may be the anomalies that eventually lead to entirely new financial primitives. He calls today’s builders the “Einstein generation of DeFi”: not because they have already found the breakthrough, but because they are producing the experiments, failures, and partial solutions from which the next coherent model of open finance may emerge. Pretraining progress is mostly coming from data Dwarkesh Patel and Jerry Han find that improvements in training data contributed far more to pretraining progress between 2019 and 2025 than changes to model architecture. At a fixed compute budget, newer datasets produced a 12x gain in compute efficiency compared with 3.7x from newer model recipes, with most of the gains occurring independently. However, model research still played a crucial role by making larger training runs stable and practical. The results come from relatively small models, so the balance may differ at the frontier. If data remains the main driver of pretraining progress, the key question is whether synthetic data can offset the finite supply of high-quality material available online. MetaDAO: Built for the net ICO boom Blockworks Research argues that MetaDAO has proven its ownership coin model but has yet to solve distribution, with launch cadence remaining below two ICOs per month. Proposed US rules could expand its addressable market by allowing qualifying projects to raise up to $5 million from retail investors, although ownership coins must avoid being classified as securities. MetaDAO is addressing its bottlenecks through permissionless launches, its Colosseum pipeline, investor scoring and a dedicated fund for smaller raises. However, increasing launch volume alone will not justify META’s valuation. The bull case depends on MetaDAO producing breakout companies that sustain secondary trading, while the base case leaves the token roughly fairly valued near $6. Brought to you by: Avalanche Summit NYC returns September 16-17, bringing together the institutions, enterprises, investors, and builders turning blockchain technology into real business outcomes. From tokenized markets and institutional finance to payments and consumer applications, the Summit will explore how production-ready infrastructure is enabling faster settlement, lower costs, and entirely new products and revenue streams. Use promo code BLOCKWORKS15 for 15% off! Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here © 2026 Blockworks 133 W 19TH ST New York, New York 10011, United States

There are two sides to every job posting... September 13, 2026 Presented By Louis Quail Editor’s note Good morning. We are writing this note to express our strong interest in welcoming you to Hiring Brew. Our background has equipped us to provide you with insights into how AI has swarmed both hiring and applying, the most bizarre questions that tech companies are asking interviewees these days, what “work trials” are and how job seekers are navigating them, and more. Looking forward to connecting! job applications AI is upending the hiring process Getty Images Need a new job? Just use AI to polish up your résumé, submit an application to an AI-powered tracking system, interview with an AI agent, and then pass an AI background check. Apply and demand Many career advisors and universities are encouraging job seekers to use AI to craft their résumés and cover letters. But then recruiters have to figure out whether the candidate is a good communicator or just good at using AI . And while 60% of hiring managers say they can identify AI-generated applications , only about 25% actually can, according to a Software Finder survey. AI also makes it easier to apply for jobs, turning recruiters’ offices into a ball pit of applications. According to hiring software platform Greenhouse: In Q1 2022, the average job opening drew 89 applications. Three years later, each opening attracted 243 hopefuls. To keep up, 90% of US employers use AI screening, according to a Stanford University study. While those tools help weed out unqualified candidates, they also turn away talented prospects. A hire calling: If you’re lucky enough to make it through the application gauntlet, it’s time to interview. But don’t bother practicing a firm handshake just yet. Nearly two-thirds of US job seekers say they’ve been interviewed by an AI bot , per Greenhouse. Passing inspection: If you get past the interview process, there’s still one more AI hurdle to clear—an exhaustive digital background check that pulls your information from dozens of different places. So, if you’ve ever been in trouble with the law, posted something questionable on social media, or experimented with a goatee in college, there’s a good chance AI will find out and let your employer know.— BC Sponsored By American Express A ~Platinum~ Opportunity Business owners, do you have a company credit card that works as hard as you do? The American Express Business Platinum Card® can open up all kinds of possibilities. Wondering what those possibilities are? The Business Platinum Card provides access to exceptional rewards and benefits. Discover how you can unlock more than $4,000 in annual business and travel value, 1 plus earn 5X Membership Rewards Points on flights and prepaid hotels booked through AmexTravel.com. Find out your welcome offer , which could be as high as 300,000 Membership Rewards® points. Terms apply. wait, what? What’s being asked at tech company job interviews? Disney+ If you think first date questions are awkward, you might not want to be interviewed by a tech company. One of the latest examples : Anthropic reportedly asked candidates what they would do if the company abandoned AI and the stock went to $0. But weird questions from tech managers are nothing new. Here are a few that have reportedly been asked, along with our suggested answers: If a Nerf football hit you in the back of the head, what would you do? (Depending on the net worth of the person who threw it, sue.) How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? (Zero. Chicago isn’t real.) What would you do if you were the sole survivor of a plane crash? (Learn to fish, get really tan, and befriend a volleyball.) What do you bring to the table that is world-class? (My ability to take a long lunch.) How many golf balls does it take to fill a school bus? (Give me a driver, put me in a tee box next to a middle school, and let’s find out.) If you were a Muppet, which would you be? (The only correct answer is Gonzo.) Exit interview: While these questions seem like something a drunk guy at a bar or a precocious child would ask, these companies are looking for a candidate to offer a thoughtful and analytical response to show they can solve complicated problems. —DL this is absolutely a test Would you fake-work for a chance to get a job? Unsplash Prepare your “working hard or hardly working?” quippy response: Companies want you to role-play as an employee before they finalize your offer letter. Work trials aren’t brand new, especially in more technical fields, but companies are increasingly leaning on them to find qualified candidates in a job market flooded with AI-optimized résumés and cover letters: It could be an unpaid mock task you complete off-site that mirrors what you’d do on the job. On the other end of the spectrum, the work trial might be a week in the office with the team you could potentially join. If the work you complete on trial benefits the company, the candidate generally has to be paid for it. About two-thirds of companies use some form of skill-based hiring for entry-level roles, according to a 2025 survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. In theory, a trial is great for checking a candidate’s skills and collaboration style while weeding out folks who are just really good at interviewing. But they can be a barrier to employed workers who can’t afford to take a full week off work for a long test that might not end in a job offer. And they can quickly turn exploitative when they’re unpaid. Applying for a job feels like screaming into the void. Companies have spent the last few years downsizing after pandemic-era overhiring. With AI supercharging the hiring process from both sides, an in-person element could make finding a job more human…if a candidate can make it past the bots to get to that round.— MM Sponsored By American Express Explore these perks, business owners. With the American Express Business Platinum Card®, you can unlock over $4,000 in