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Chapters

Meet the Cast

David Booth

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.”

Mark Hebner

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.

Rex Sinquefield

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.

Eugene Fama

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.

Myron Scholes

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.

Robert Merton

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.

Roger Ibbotson

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.

Ken French

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.

John “Mac” McQuown

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.

Jeanne Sinquefield

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.

Gerard O’Reilly

At age 16, when most teens are just thinking about college, Ireland native Gerard O’Reilly was studying for a BA in theoretical physics at Trinity College Dublin. An MS in high-performance computing followed, then a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech in 2004. The next milestone for this rocket scientist: researcher at Dimensional, where he would later rise to Chief Investment Officer. In 2017, O’Reilly became the firm’s Co-CEO and is also Co-CIO.

Savina Rivoza

Born in Bulgaria, a communist country at the time, Savina Rizova came to Dartmouth College to study finance and became a research assistant for Professor Ken French. Now Co-CIO and Global Head of Research at Dimensional, Rizova was named one of Barron’s “100 Most Influential Women in US Finance” in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Dave Butler

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.”

Norm Mindel

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.

Senator Bill Bradley

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.

Information and opinions presented in this material do not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer of any services or products for sale and are not intended to provide a sufficient basis on which to make an investment decision. This is not an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation to buy or sell, any security. Investments involve risks. The investment return and principal value of an investment may fluctuate so that an investor’s shares, when redeemed, may be worth more or less than their original value. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. There is no guarantee strategies will be successful.

Unauthorized reproduction or transmission of this material is strictly prohibited. Dimensional accepts no responsibility for loss arising from the use of the information contained herein. This material is not directed at any person in any jurisdiction where the availability of this material is prohibited or would subject Dimensional or its products or services to any registration, licensing, or other such legal requirements within the jurisdiction.

“Dimensional” may refer to one specific affiliated entity or to Dimensional separate but affiliated entities generally, rather than to one particular entity. These entities are Dimensional Holdings Inc., Dimensional Fund Advisors LP, Dimensional Fund Advisors Ltd., Dimensional Ireland Limited, DFA Australia Limited, Dimensional Fund Advisors Canada ULC, Dimensional Fund Advisors Pte. Ltd., Dimensional Japan Ltd., and Dimensional Hong Kong Limited. Dimensional Hong Kong Limited is licensed by the Securities and Futures Commission to conduct Type 1 (dealing in securities) regulated activities only and does not provide asset management services.

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Dimensional Fund Advisors LP is an investment advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Behind the Scenes

Errol Morris on the Art and Science of Markets

In learning about markets, I’m confronted with questions: What governs their behavior? What do they really represent? What are they telling us? What do they mean?

Couple these quandaries with the deep human need to learn something from the past, not just make sense out of it. What governs boom and bust? Why one price rather than another? And one of the deepest questions: Can we predict the future? The 1950s and ’60s saw as great a revolution in finance as the one in science during the early Renaissance. We’ve witnessed the growth of computers and come to the realization that the markets themselves might be a real-world computer, with investors playing the role of processors.

What science does is try to make visible the hidden, the unknown, the potentially indecipherable. People are always hoping that scientists will reveal to them the true meaning of things. But even if science takes us deeper into the behavior of the world around us, it does not reveal deeper meaning. Why do things behave the way they do? Why do certain phenomena commandeer our attention, directing it to hidden patterns cloaked in the ubiquity of noise? As in art, so in science that eternal question remains: What is defined by us and what is out there to be discovered by us?

We’re trying to discover a reality beyond what is manifest. We’re learning to look at the world in a different way than the familiar or the expected—realizing that subtle shapes and strange forms can often reveal something new and unexpected. Art and science show us that there is often something beyond our ken, beyond our reach. Ironically, modern finance doesn’t tell us about what will happen next. It takes us into that mystery.

—Errol Morris

About the Director

Errol Morris’s films have won many awards, including an Oscar for The Fog of War, the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for A Brief History of Time, the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for Standard Operating Procedure, and the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for The Thin Blue Line.

His films have been honored by the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. Morris’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Roger Ebert called his first film, Gates of Heaven, one of the 10 best films of all time. Morris is also the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Believing Is Seeing and A Wilderness of Error. Morris has directed over 1,000 television commercials, including campaigns for Apple, Levi’s, Nike, Target, Citibank, and Miller High Life. He has directed short films for the 2002 and 2007 Academy Awards, ESPN, and many charitable and political organizations. In 2001, Morris won an Emmy for “Photobooth,” a commercial for PBS.

Morris has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was a graduate student at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. He has received the Columbia Journalism Award and honorary degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Brandeis University, and Middlebury College.

Paul Leonard-Morgan on Composing the Film’s Score

Collaborating with Errol is always a unique process. Music drives the momentum and energy of many of his films. When he approached me about his film on the world of finance, it got my brain going overtime.

The thought of stock tickers, the tapes printing out—it gave me this thought of creating a real energy and hustle and bustle to the music. The momentum of these images was what I tried to transfer into musical motifs, so in all the tracks there are perpetual-motion rhythms and polyrhythms. There’s a real pace and flow to the music, though one never fully settles into it. Every time you feel the music getting into a groove, it takes you in a different direction, so you’re never sitting comfortably—the same frenetic feeling I would imagine one finds on the stock market floor.

Recording the orchestra in Nashville really brought these tracks to life. This kind of music is incredibly tough to play, with the wind playing arpeggiated motifs in different time to the strings—all these rhythms driving the pace of the film and helping the story on its journey, the same way that the tickers create an energy. The musicians did a phenomenal job.

—Paul Leonard-Morgan

About the Composer

Paul Leonard-Morgan is a BAFTA award–winning and Emmy-nominated composer whose unique cinematic style fuses orchestra with electronica. He has worked with director Errol Morris on a string of projects, including the documentary features The B-Side and American Dharma and the Netflix series Wormwood.

Prior to working in film, he produced and arranged for musical acts including Belle and Sebastian, Snow Patrol, Mogwai, and No Doubt. His groundbreaking score for 2011’s Limitless solidified him as a major player in the film music industry. In 2012, his work for the film Dredd was widely recognized as launching a new generation of hybrid scores. Other screen credits include the documentary The Quiet One, the feature Last Breath, the hit series reboot Dynasty, Netflix’s Designated Survivor, and the feature The Tomorrow Man, which debuted at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. He co-scored Amazon’s 2020 sci-fi series Tales from the Loop with composer Philip Glass. He also worked on three short Minions films and the animated Walking with Dinosaurs 3D. His work in video games includes music for Cyberpunk 2077, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, and Battlefield Hardline.

Listen to the Tune Out the Noise soundtrack on:

About the Art in the Film

David Booth, the Founder and Chairman of Dimensional, is an avid art collector. The grounds of Booth’s residence along Lake Austin in Austin, Texas, are home to the numerous paintings, sculptures, and other pieces featured in Tune Out the Noise.

Art and investing may seem like strange bedfellows. Booth sees it differently.

“People say, ‘Well, what kind of art do you like to collect?’ … It’s very similar to my view of economics and investing. I like simple ideas well executed,” he explains in the film. “My view of life is there’s no evidence that complexity adds a lot of value.”

As a philanthropist, Booth has participated in and donated to artistic initiatives across the US. The David Booth Conservation Center and Department is responsible for the preservation of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) collection in New York. In 2022, Booth received MoMA’s David Rockefeller Award, presented annually to “an individual from the business community who exemplifies enlightened generosity and effective advocacy of cultural and civic endeavors.”

In the future, Booth plans to convert his property for civic use, making the artwork there accessible to the public.

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Dimensional Fund Advisors LP is an investment advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Details

Director

Errol Morris

Cast

David Booth, Mark Hebner, Rex Sinquefield, Eugene Fama, Myron Scholes, Robert C. Merton, Roger Ibbotson, Kenneth French, John “Mac” McQuown, Jeanne Sinquefield, Gerard O’Reilly, Savina Rizova, David Butler

Genres

Documentaries, Educational, Financial, Investing, Economics

This movie is

Informative

Audio

English

Subtitles

English, French, Dutch, German

Summary

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) turns his lens to an unlikely cast of upstarts who transformed the investment landscape in the documentary Tune Out the Noise. The film chronicles a group of academics at the University of Chicago in the 1960s whose groundbreaking research challenged Wall Street’s status quo and was used by firms like Dimensional Fund Advisors to disrupt traditional methods of investing, ultimately reshaping the way the world views markets.

Many of the prominent academic and financial leaders featured in Tune Out the Noise were instrumental in developing and applying research that showed how rules-based, broadly diversified portfolios could lower barriers to entry and reduce costs for investors. This new approach, which stood in stark contrast to the stock-picking and performance-chasing tactics that predominated, led to the invention of index funds, the founding of Dimensional, and the evolution of client-focused advice. The result was a revolution in finance that helped usher in a new era for investors.

Shot in Morris’s iconic style, Tune Out the Noise unfolds through revealing interviews with Nobel Prize-winning economists who have long-standing ties to Dimensional, including Eugene Fama, Robert Merton, and Myron Scholes. The film also features Dartmouth professor Ken French, who has co-authored numerous research papers with Fama, along with Dimensional founders David Booth and Rex Sinquefield, indexing pioneer Mac McQuown, former US Senator Bill Bradley, IFA Founder Mark Hebner, and many others.

Disclosure:
“Tune Out the Noise” is a documentary presented by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). Index Fund Advisors, Inc. (IFA) is not affiliated with DFA, and the inclusion of the documentary in this email does not constitute an endorsement of DFA or its services. Likewise, the participation of personalities in the film does not imply endorsement of IFA, its services, strategies, or any specific investment product or advisor. The film explores how academics revolutionized investing methods, but no content should be construed as investment, tax, or legal advice. All investments involve risks, including loss of principal, and past performance is no guarantee of future results.

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Tune Out The Noise