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An Errol Morris Film

2023

NR

88m

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When it comes to investing, data doesn't lie.

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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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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Tune Out the Noise
Trailer
Tune Out the Noise

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.