Investor David Booth on patience and playing the long game

At a Place the Ladder event on Sept. 17, 2026, David Booth — founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors and author of the book “Stay Calm” — joined Holdsworth board member Rob Kaplan for a conversation on conviction, uncertainty and the discipline behind five decades of investing, produced in partnership with the Texas Book Festival.

From shoe salesman to wealthy investor

Booth grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, and sold shoes before enrolling in the doctoral program in finance at the University of Chicago — “an unusual period of time,” he said, when the field of finance was just emerging as a science. His first mentor was Gene Fama, the Chicago professor who won a Nobel Prize in economics. When Booth decided to leave the program, Fama connected him with Mac McQuown at Wells Fargo, who started a $12 trillion financial revolution with the creation of the first index fund. That relationship set Booth on the path to founding Dimensional Fund Advisors.

Asked who else shaped him, Booth pointed home. “Of course, my dad, my parents were [mentors],” he said. “I learned so much from them. They taught me really what true worth was about.”

In 2008, Booth donated $300 million to his alma mater, prompting the University of Chicago to rename the Booth Graduate School of Business in his honor.

Plan, don’t predict

Booth’s core investing philosophy, distilled in his new book “Stay Calm: Learn to Embrace Uncertainty in Investing and Life,” rejects prediction in favor of process. “The tough decisions in life deal with uncertainty,” he said. Rather than trying to time the market or pick winning stocks, Booth argues for building a diversified portfolio and staying invested, pointing to 2020 as an example. The market fell sharply right after the pandemic, and many investors got out. But the market rebounded briskly, meaning those investors missed a good run. “If you want to get that long-term return in stocks, you got to be there,” he said.

That discipline extends to how Booth thinks about “noise” – all the talk shows and podcasts on investing, watching the numbers go up and down on a daily basis.

“What really counts is meaningful data,” he said. “The difference between all the data that you’re hit with and what’s meaningful — the difference between those two things is noise.” Errol Morris’s “Tune Out the Noise” documentary on Dimensional has drawn more than 32 million views on YouTube.

Decisions over outcomes

Kaplan pressed Booth on a favorite theme: judging decisions by their quality, not just how they turn out. “If you’ve made a good decision in life or investing, that’s all you can do,” Booth said. “Uncertainty being what it is, sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t.” When an outcome disappoints, he asks himself whether it was bad luck or a flaw in his process and adjusts only if it’s the latter.

True wealth

Booth traced that philosophy back to a Christmas trip home during graduate school, watching relatives without indoor plumbing enjoy themselves while he sat stressed over a research paper. “They have it figured out,” he remembers thinking. “They know what true worth is.” Though his parents had little money, he describes them as wealthy in family.

That value shapes his philanthropy today, from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business — renamed in 2008 following his gift — to his trusteeship at the Museum of Modern Art.

“With charity, you get more out of it than you give,” he said. Asked what keeps him up at night, Booth turned to education: “The US K-12 system ranks at the bottom among developed countries,” he said. “How did that happen? Doesn’t anybody care? That’s one of my hot buttons, for sure.”

Love as the ultimate compounder

Kaplan closed the conversation by asking Booth to explain one last line from the book: love is the ultimate compounder. “Just love people you love over time,” Booth said. “You get the compounding effect versus the puppy love that you started with. I think that’s what life is about — go for the compounding, the long-term compound return of love.”