David Booth: ‘The Markets Work Well for Everybody, Not Just the Insiders’

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**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
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**Ben Johnson** (0:33)
Welcome to The Long View. I'm Ben Johnson, Head of Client Solutions with Morningstar.

**Amy Arnott** (0:39)
I'm Amy Arnott, Portfolio Strategist for Morningstar.

**Ben Johnson** (0:42)
Today's guest on The Long View is David Booth. David is a repeat guest, the founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors and has just released a new book titled, Stay Calm, Learn to Embrace Uncertainty in Investing in Life.
Amy, we had such a terrific conversation with David, and there are almost too many highlights for me to choose from. So I'm going to really call out what I thought was one of the interesting through lines, which really centered on data. And at one point, David shared with us, without data, people are just arguing beliefs. And there was so much time within our industry where investors really were in a data desert. And really that foundational layer was critical to everything that David, his colleagues at Dimensional, and so many others around the broader investing industry have ultimately brought to bear for the benefit of so many investors over the years, who once may have felt like outsiders and are now very much inside and benefiting from decades worth of research and work in a way that they couldn't have just without that data foundation. So the through line of data, as mundane as it seems today in 2026, really stood out to me.

**Amy Arnott** (2:13)
Yeah, Ben, I thought that was a really interesting point, too. And I really love David's comments about how having access to a more complete data set can really help provide a sense of calmness and reassurance for investors, even in an uncertain environment. And another highlight for me, stay tuned to find out more about Gene Fama's favorite Swedish pop group.

**Ben Johnson** (2:41)
Oh, no. Now that we've got people on the edge of their seats, Amy, without further ado, let's dig in with David.
David, welcome back to The Long View. Thank you so much for joining Amy and I today.

**David Booth** (2:58)
Thanks for having me.

**Ben Johnson** (3:00)
David, the occasion for you coming back to the podcast is that you've just published a new book, Stay Calm, Learn to Embrace Uncertainty in Investing and Life.
I want to start with the life bit of that. Notably, in the book, you describe yourself as a bit of an outsider, having been born in Garnet, Kansas, being Kansas born and bred. How did that ultimately become part of the way that you view the world, and by extension in your career, form the way that you viewed markets investing in a way that fundamentally was different from and in many ways has reshaped what were conventional Wall Street norms?

**David Booth** (3:48)
Well, I think a lot of people view themselves as being outsiders.
My parents were kind of that way, and they thought that, well, the insiders make all the money, so I'm not going to invest because the insiders will just take advantage of me. That's kind of a, unfortunately, a view a lot of people have. And that's where, you know, the science has really helped people a lot, the development of financial science in the 60s and 70s. You know, the conclusion is that, you know, the markets work well for everybody, not just the insiders. In fact, the insiders seem to have a rough time doing as well as the market. It's actually the outsiders that should feel good about all this academic research and so forth, because today you can buy market portfolios very easily. You can buy the market, and that seems to be about as well as the pros do. Now personally, also being an outsider, in fact, coming in to the Covina Coindia University of Chicago, in the, you know, the PhD program in the late 60s, it was incredibly stimulating time, and the field of finance was changing. And you could characterize these academics themselves as being outsiders, you know, to the mainstream Wall Street crowd. In fact, all this research really challenged kind of the prevailing point of view of Wall Street in the 60s and 70s, and led to this, this revolution in finance that's really helped people tremendously, you know, fees. The result of this research and the applications is fees are much lower, so that's gotta help, and then portfolios are better designed and so forth. All of that comes from having these academics that were kind of outsiders, you know, examining the data.