Rex Sinquefield

Rex Andrew Sinquefield (born September 7, 1944) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist who has been called an "index-fund pioneer" for creating the first passively managed index fund open to the general public.

Sinquefield was also a co-founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors.

He is active in Missouri politics.

Sinquefield had 18 cleft palate operations before age five.

His father died when he was five years old.

Sinquefield and his brother were placed in a local Catholic orphanage, the Saint Vincent Home for Children in St. Louis, Missouri.

Sinquefield told the BBC that the school's regimentation taught him self-discipline.

When they were teenagers, Sinquefield and his brother returned home to live with their mother.

He graduated from Bishop DuBourg High School in 1962.

He studied to be a priest at the Diocesan Seminary at Cardinal Glennon College in St. Louis.

During the Vietnam War, he served as what he described as a "high-end gopher" in the finance corps at Fort Riley.

He majored in business for his undergraduate degree from Saint Louis University and received an MBA from University of Chicago.

Sinquefield worked at the American National Bank of Chicago, developing, in 1973, the first S&P 500 passively managed index fund.

Due to high transaction costs at the time and low-liquidity for many smaller company stocks, Sinquefield did not initially buy all 500 stocks listed in the S&P 500, but he was able to nonetheless closely track the index.

After seven years, the fund managed $12 billion.

In May 1974, in the depths of the worst bear market since the 1930s, Sinquefield and Roger Ibbotson made a brash prediction: The Dow Jones Industrial Average, floundering in the 800s at the time, would hit 9,218 in 1998 and 10,000 by November 1999.

Their prediction proved largely accurate.

In 1981, Sinquefield and another University of Chicago teaching assistant, David Booth, co-founded Dimensional Fund Advisors, the first passive fund focused on small (microcap) companies customarily ignored in large institutional portfolios of the era.

With Yale School of Management professor Roger G. Ibbotson, he co-wrote the 1989 book Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation, a study of stock market returns.

Dimensional Fund Advisors' investment strategy has been said to create an optimal portfolio consisting of various funds that emulate the different style and size attributes of various securities markets worldwide so that one fund might behave like the S&P 500, another might correlate with just the value stocks in the S&P 500, while a third might emulate the performance of all small-cap stocks.

Sinquefield is a proponent of passive investment, meaning that he believes you simply cannot beat the market.

In 2005, he retired from DFA because he was “bored” and returned to St. Louis, where he became involved in politics and philanthropy.

On his return to St. Louis, Sinquefield co-founded the Show-Me Institute with R. Crosby Kemper III, a Kansas City banker.

Based in Clayton, Show-Me is a think tank that commissions studies on public-policy issues.

It has been labeled libertarian, conservative, and free-market.

He is president of the institute, whose motto is “Advancing liberty with responsibility by promoting market solutions for Missouri public policy.”

Show-Me has successfully lobbied for a cable franchise reform bill and HB 818, which made Missouri the first state to let employers contribute pretax dollars to employees' health-savings accounts.

Show-Me has also opposed governments' use of eminent domain.

Sinquefield became a major financial contributor to political campaigns of both political parties in Missouri politics after the Missouri legislature ended campaign finance limits in 2009.

In 2014, he supported a ballot initiative to abolish teacher tenure in Missouri and he is a major funder of other groups and PACs, such as Pelopidas, LLC.

According to a 2015 Governing Magazine article, "big majorities" in both houses of the Missouri legislature have received campaign contributions from Sinquefield.

He has particularly focused on altering public education, tax reform, and accountability in government.

He donated $1 million to Republican Bev Randles' 2016 campaign for Lieutenant Governor of Missouri and three quarters of a million to Kurt Schaefer, a Republican candidate for attorney general.

Both candidates lost.

Sinquefield has also donated to Missouri candidates Shane Schoeller, Chris Koster, and Sarah Steelman, as well as to the 2016 gubernatorial campaign of Catherine Hanaway.

As of June 30, 2018, it managed more than $582 billion in assets.

Rex and Jeanne are supporters of Senator Josh Hawley with significant contributions to his campaign in 2020.

Sinquefield also donated to Mike Parson that year.

In 2021, Sinquefield donated $250,000 to two campaigns: Scott Fitzpatrick's bid for state auditor and Mike Kehoe's prospective candidacy for governor in 2024.

Many of Sinquefield's efforts in recent years have been focused on changing tax policy in Missouri.