A new documentary titled “Tune Out The Noise” brings together some of the academic heavyweights whose work reshaped the financial industry and helped lower costs for all investors.
The film, made by Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris, chronicles the rise of academic finance in the middle of the twentieth century and how it led to a boom in passive investing and to the creation of Dimensional Fund Advisors, which now has more than $700 billion in assets under management.
Morris and David Booth, Dimensional chairman and the namesake of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, spoke to CNBC’s Bob Pisani on Thursday ahead of the film’s New York premier.
“It’s really about how markets work and how different that is from people’s intuition or perception,” Booth told Pisani.
In addition to Booth and some Dimensional executives, the film features interviews with many of the biggest names in financial academia, including Myron Scholes, Robert Merton, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French.
The work of those academics, who have all had roles at Dimensional over the years, helped push the investment world away from traditional stock picking and toward passive, low-cost strategies. That trend extends beyond Dimensional, with firms like Vanguard using those insights to build their own businesses.
“People are getting a much better deal now than when I started in 1971,” Booth said.
Morris’ previous work includes “The Fog of War,” which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004, as well as “The Thin Blue Line.”
“One of the reasons I became a filmmaker, or a documentary filmmaker, whatever you want to call it, is I like to hear people telling stories. And this is filled with it,” Morris said of his new film.