It’s a gift link to today’s WSJ. The film is on YouTube, free (probably horribly disfigured by ill-placed ads, dunno). 88 minutes.
A Billionaire and an Oscar Winner Have Made a Hit Movie. It’s About Investing.
The new documentary from Errol Morris makes index funds and passive investing thrilling
David Booth went to graduate school because he wanted to get a Ph.D. and become a professor. What he learned was how to make a fortune as an entirely new kind of investor.
When he was a student at the University of Chicago a half-century ago, his teachers were future Nobel Prize winners whose curious ideas about financial markets would transform the way people think about money. Their lectures were rough drafts of the papers that showed how ordinary investors who barely touched their boring portfolios could outperform professional managers and famed stock pickers after fees and expenses. And that innovative and counterintuitive research on market efficiency would one day fuel the rise of [passive investing].
It would also change Booth’s life. His decision to apply those intoxicating academic ideas was the beginning of a wildly successful investment firm called [Dimensional Fund Advisers]. And ever since, the billionaire has wanted to explain zen-like investing the way he was taught it.
Not a recommendation, I haven’t seen it, just thought I would pass it along.