Brad Pitt And The Smaller Companies Effect

Brad Pitt is currently starring in Moneyball, the film of Michael Lewis' book of the same name. This tells the story of how the Oakland Athletics (A's) baseball team outperformed most of their richer competitors during the late 1990s and early 2000s, after discovering that certain skills and tactics were undervalued by the market.

Private investors have a similar advantage over the institutions that dominate the stock market. That's because of the "Smaller Companies Effect", the tendency of smaller companies' shares, as a group, to outperform the bigger companies over the longer term.