Ben Felix did not arrive at finance by following a market tip. As a student who spent much of his time playing basketball, he needed to choose a degree. He asked Northeastern University which program was the hardest. The answer led him to mechanical engineering. It is a wonderfully odd way to pick a profession, especially when the profession eventually picked was something else entirely.
The engineering degree was completed in 2011. Basketball had taken him to Boston and to the Northeastern Huskies; a return to Canada led to an MBA at Carleton University and, in 2013, a job at PWL Capital in Ottawa. He became a CFA charterholder in 2016 and a CFP professional the following year. The credentials matter in his line of work, but the more revealing continuity is a way of thinking. An engineer asks whether a structure can carry a load. Felix began asking whether an investment claim could carry its evidence.
That question has given him an unusual career in public. He is now PWL Capital's chief investment officer and a portfolio manager. He also hosts the Common Sense Investing YouTube channel and co-created Rational Reminder, a weekly podcast with Cameron Passmore. Across video, audio and written research, the subjects range from index funds to retirement decisions. The recurring character is uncertainty. Felix tends to invite it into the room before anyone has a chance to disguise it as a forecast.
The engineer finds a camera
PWL encouraged its advisers to make videos at a time when the firm could hardly expect to outspend Canada's large banks on advertising. Felix volunteered. In 2017, he introduced Common Sense Investing with a deliberately plain promise: he would use peer-reviewed research, data and logic to sort financial facts from sales pitches. Early questions included whether index funds could beat active approaches and how difficult it really is to beat a market.
A video series about those questions can sound like an assignment from a stern professor. Felix's gift was to let the question do the entertaining. If a product claims extra return, what is the cost? If a strategy worked in the past, what would have happened after fees? If a prediction seems obvious, who else has already noticed? A viewer can follow the trail without being asked to buy a secret map at the end.
The opening line of his 2017 introduction was: “The truth is easier to keep track of than a pack of lies.” It is a good line, and a practical one. Repeating a coherent set of principles means fewer acrobatics when markets change direction. In a later interview, Felix said the channel worked far better than he or colleagues expected and accelerated his career. That is an uncommon admission in a business that likes every success to look carefully planned.
His on-screen manner is measured. The topic may be a feverish new fund, but the presentation rarely is. He lays out assumptions, distinguishes a good idea from a good sales pitch, and leaves space for a conclusion that is less exciting than the advertisement. There is humor in that restraint. The finance industry can turn a perfectly serviceable portfolio into a costume party; Felix keeps asking what is under the costume.
A podcast born in the hallway
The Rational Reminder origin story has no boardroom grandeur. Felix and Passmore discussed a podcast in a hallway at PWL. They got microphones and recorded. The early files had audio problems; one first episode had to be remade. A marketing colleague later recalled receiving a message that two episodes already existed and being asked what to do with them. It was, as many durable projects are, an experiment that had begun before anyone had settled the paperwork.
The title came from a text exchange between Felix and a friend named Aaron. They went back and forth for roughly 45 minutes before landing on Rational Reminder. The words fit a show about returning to basic questions when a market headline makes an investor want to do something immediately. Its first episode appeared in August 2018. That month brought 767 audio downloads, according to Felix's own account of the show's growth.
By 2025, the format had a production team, compliance review, video editing and a listener community. Through November of that year, the show averaged just under 237,000 combined monthly audio downloads and YouTube views. October 2025 reached 334,000. Those are audience figures, not investment returns, but they explain the scope of Felix's work: a conversation started in an Ottawa office now reaches people far beyond it.
August 2018
audio and YouTube, 2025*
October 2025
The show has also widened its company. Passmore, Dan Bortolotti and Ben Wilson have all joined its evolving conversations, and its guests include academic researchers and practitioners. A 2025 behind-the-scenes episode made the labor visible: an editor, a producer, marketing staff and a reviewer all help get the weekly discussion out the door. It is tempting to picture a podcast as two people and two microphones. At this scale, the microphones are the smallest part of the operation.
In August 2026, Felix and Passmore spoke with David Booth, the Dimensional Fund Advisors co-founder, for an episode on 50 years of evidence-based investing. The conversation returned to questions that have occupied Felix since his first videos: how research becomes a practical process, why prediction remains difficult, and what an investor is supposed to do with uncertainty. It is the sort of guest a show like Rational Reminder is built to accommodate. The discussion can travel through financial history and still arrive at the ordinary decision facing someone with savings and a long horizon.
A useful suspicion of certainty
Felix's ideas are recognizably those of evidence-based investing: broad diversification, attention to costs, patience, and skepticism toward attempts to outguess the market. They are familiar principles. His distinctive work is in applying them to claims that arrive in new packaging. In a 2025 interview, he described a wave of complex ETFs and asked listeners to consider whom the innovation helps. An ETF is a container; its contents can still be expensive, complicated or poorly suited to the buyer.
The same habit shapes his reaction to market drama. He has said that views about what will happen next often fail to match what actually happens. Advisers can control fees, taxes, planning and the clarity of their advice. They cannot control the next headline. The answer sounds almost offensively sensible, which may be why it bears repeating every week.
There is an interesting tension here. Felix is a highly visible media figure because he keeps warning about the appeal of confident media stories. He has an audience in the hundreds of thousands while explaining why most people should hesitate before making a grand bet. It is possible to make caution compelling if the examples are precise enough and the speaker allows himself to be a person, not just a chart.
He does. In podcast conversations, there are jokes about basketball shoes and the occasional detour into the machinery of the show itself. PWL's team page records his height as six feet ten inches, a fact that makes the basketball past less mysterious. His account of choosing engineering by asking for the hardest degree has the same effect: it gives the tidy public biography a lopsided human entrance.
The point of the portfolio
A purely technical version of Felix would end with asset allocation. His written work goes further. In 2023, he authored a PWL paper titled Finding and Funding a Good Life, exploring how financial decisions connect with a life worth living. On the firm's team page, asked what wealth means to him, he answered in three words: “Ownership of time.”
That answer is less mechanical than the CV might suggest. It turns a portfolio from a scoreboard into an instrument. Money may give someone room to choose work, family time or leisure; a higher number alone does not say how to use the room. Felix's work on the subject reflects a broader turn in Rational Reminder toward behavior and decision-making, alongside the familiar questions about stocks and bonds.
“Ownership of time.”
The path from engineering to that sentence is less crooked than it first appears. Engineering taught him to inspect how something works. Financial planning asks what the thing is for. Both questions are necessary; neither becomes more useful through theatrical certainty. Felix's public career has followed that sequence, from examining an investment claim to asking what a better financial decision allows a person to do.
When asked in 2025 where he might be without the videos and podcast, Felix said he would probably still be at PWL, though perhaps in a different role. He also said those projects had advanced his career and carried the firm's reputation further than its size might suggest. It is a frank description of what good communication can do for a professional firm. His side of the bargain has been to make the reasoning public.
This is why the seemingly boring answer keeps attracting attention. A person with an engineering notebook, a basketball history and a microphone can return to the same questions for years, because people keep meeting them in new forms. What is the claim? What is the evidence? What will it cost? Then, after all that arithmetic, the question that matters most: what are you trying to make room for?