Meet the Cast

When he sold shoes on commission as a teenager in Lawrence, Kansas, David Booth refused to shade the truth just to make a sale. Booth eventually built a global investment firm based on the reality of market pricing instead of the mirage of stock picking. “It’s not about being big,” says the Founder and Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors. “It’s about doing things the right way.”

A ruptured aorta took his dad’s life in 1950, when Rex Sinquefield was 5 years old. He grew up in a St. Louis orphanage and was drafted into the military before landing in the legendary Merton Miller’s class at the University of Chicago, where he first learned about efficient markets. Sinquefield and fellow UChicago PhD student David Booth would go on to found Dimensional in 1981.

Gene Fama, “a poor kid from Malden,” a working-class town in eastern Massachusetts, at first majored in French when he enrolled at Tufts, his local university, in the 1950s. But he soon discovered economics and fell in love with it. Fama, a 2013 Nobel laureate, is regarded as the father of the efficient market hypothesis.

One of the first computer programmers at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, Myron Scholes soon earned a scholarship to the PhD program at the Graduate School of Business. Fischer Black and Scholes developed the option pricing framework in the early 1970s, and Scholes was named a Nobel laureate in 1997 (with Robert Merton; Black had passed away in 1995) for creating a groundbreaking method to determine the value of derivatives.

At 10 years old, Robert Merton bought his first stock (General Motors). In the next two decades, painstaking work by researchers who studied stock price data revolutionized finance into a science—and Merton’s own scientific work in dynamic portfolio theory and the pricing of derivatives paved the way for industry-leading advances in risk management.

Not “mechanically inclined,” Roger Ibbotson knew he wasn’t cut out for his family’s HVAC business. So he went to the University of Chicago to study economics. Ibbotson and another UChicago alum, Rex Sinquefield, transformed voluminous data generated by the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) into Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation, their influential 1977 study of major US asset class returns.

While studying finance as a PhD student at the University of Rochester in the early 1980s, Ken French realized that the names of most mutual funds told investors almost nothing about their underlying investments. A decade later, trailblazing research by Eugene Fama and French on factors that explain stock and bond returns forever changed the mutual fund landscape and the fundamentals of portfolio management.

A farm boy from Sandwich, Illinois, John “Mac” McQuown grew up understanding that agriculture was a numbers game. His dedication to data analysis eventually led to a position created just for him at Wells Fargo Bank in 1964. A decade later, McQuown and Booth created one of the first S&P 500 index funds. When Booth launched Dimensional, McQuown became a founding board member.

Dimensional needed to hire somebody to manage trading when the firm began. At the time, Rex Sinquefield’s wife, Jeanne, who had a PhD and an MBA from the University of Chicago, was designing options for the Chicago Board of Trade. A self-described “data freak,” Jeanne took the job at Dimensional, where she ended up wearing numerous hats, including training all traders and portfolio managers. She served as Executive Vice President and Head of Trading until retiring in 2005.

Following a decorated college basketball career at the University of California, Berkeley, and a few years as a pro, Dave Butler joined a big Wall Street firm. He would soon lose a significant amount of his net worth on a stock (Boston Chicken) recommended by his broker. It was one of several “aha” moments that led Butler, now Co-CEO of Dimensional, to become a champion of “holistic wealth management.”

After big success in the pharmaceutical industry, Mark Hebner retired at age 32. Then a cold-calling broker persuaded him to buy a bunch of individual municipal bonds and stocks. Compared to investing in a portfolio of passively managed funds, that sales pitch led to his missing out on millions in potential gains. To help other investors avoid his error, Hebner created one of the first web-based advisory firms, Index Fund Advisors.

A co-founder of Forum Financial Management, Norm Mindel is a renowned financial advisor, attorney, CPA, CFP, author, and public speaker. Working with Dimensional changed his professional career and helped his clients and family achieve their financial goals through a long-term, disciplined investment approach.

A financial advisor once told former US Senator Bill Bradley, “Not many people have access to something so intimate as people’s dreams. That’s what I have.” The lesson, Bradley says, is that achieving any dream—a vacation home, a beautiful painting, sending children to college—depends on how people invest. Bradley, a two-time NBA champion with the New York Knicks, is a consultant to Dimensional.