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Shari interviews David G. Booth, Founder and Executive Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors. David shares his path from selling newspapers and shoes to founding one of the largest money management firms in the world. He also discusses how he gives back to the organizations that helped him along the way.
David Booth is Executive Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, a firm he founded in 1981. Under David’s leadership, Dimensional has grown from a fledgling business operating out of the spare room of his Brooklyn brownstone apartment to a global investment manager with more than 1,500 employees and $540 billion in assets under management. David led Dimensional as CEO and later Co-CEO until 2017, when he stepped back from the daily management of the firm. He remains closely involved in strategic initiatives at Dimensional.
A trailblazer in the financial world, David helped create one of the world’s first index funds in the 1970s and launched the first passively managed small company strategy in the early ’80s. He has spent his career applying groundbreaking financial theory and research to the practical world of asset management, working closely with renowned academics to develop innovative investment strategies that he believed could outperform index funds, pioneering what would later be called factor investing.
David received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1968 and a master’s degree in business in 1969 from the University of Kansas. In 1971, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago. Over the years, David has been a benefactor to both schools. Upon announcing a gift from the Booth family to the business school at Chicago in 2008, David cited his education there as being instrumental to his later success with Dimensional. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is named in David’s honor, and the gift has helped to advance its field-defining research and to support the school’s faculty, a number of whom have had close ties to Dimensional. David has also donated to support athletics at the University of Kansas — as a boy, he ushered there at football games—and he is a vocal advocate of the role sports play in keeping alumni connected to a school.
An avid art collector and enthusiast, David has participated in and donated to artistic initiatives across the US, and the David Booth Conservation Center and Department is responsible for the preservation of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York.
Learn more about Dimensional Fund Advisors: https://www.dimensional.com/us-en/financial-professionals
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