Billionaire David Booth helped pioneer index investing. Here’s his advice for investors.

August 28, 2026 / 1:02 PM EDT / CBS News

Index investing pioneer David Booth has a simple message for people navigating volatile financial markets: Stay calm and keep investing.

Booth, a billionaire several times over whose Dimensional Fund Advisors manages $1 trillion, expands on that advice in a new book, "Stay Calm: Learn to Embrace Uncertainty in Investing and Life," scheduled for publication on Sept. 1. Part memoir and part investment guide, the book explains why investors should strive to accept the uncertainty inherent in the market rather than trying to outsmart it.

Until index investing emerged in the 1970s, Americans largely invested by picking individual stocks — a perpetual risk — or by putting their money in a fund "actively" managed by a portfolio manager, which can carry considerably higher fees than index funds. At the University of Chicago, Booth studied under economist Eugene Fama, a future Nobel laureate whose "efficient market hypothesis" helped pave the way for index investing.

In his book, Booth recounts how University of Chicago academics analyzed annual New York Stock Exchange returns from 1926 through 1960. They found that stocks returned an average of 9% a year, while most active managers failed to…

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/entertainment/