photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

KU alumnus and donor David Booth stands with a display of his new book, "Stay Calm," on Friday, Sept. 11, 2026, at the Lawrence Public Library.

He called his new book “Stay Calm,” but what David Booth would like to call his next one is an idea that’s just as important to him:

“Stay Invested.”

That refers to Booth’s advice to nervous investors – staying the course for the long term instead of panic-selling when the market dips. But it could just as well be about his relationship with Lawrence, a town where he sold popcorn and shoes as a youth and where a newly renovated football stadium now bears his name.

Booth, the founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors who now lives in Austin, Texas, was back in Lawrence this week to launch the book at his alma mater – at the conference center built into David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium, of course.

The book is part memoir, part investment advice, and a little bit of life advice as well about what “true wealth” looks like. For Booth, giving back to places that shaped him is part of that true wealth.

“In philanthropy, there are a number of things I look at, but payback is the start,” he told the Journal-World on Friday. “KU helped me so much; I want to be helpful.”

As for the investment advice, Booth focuses on trusting the market over the long term rather than trying to predict and outsmart it. Part of his conviction comes from research that shows that people can’t consistently pick winning investments. But part of it also comes from something basic about human nature, he told the Journal-World: “Men and women want to make their lives better. When bad things happen to them, they figure out how to make things better.”

“There’ll be winners and losers, and I don’t know who the winners will be,” Booth said. “But here’s what I believe: Human ingenuity, that’s always what bails us out. And I don’t see that ever disappearing.”

How to help?

At Booth’s book launch on Thursday, in a packed auditorium, a special guest had some different investment advice for the audience:

Put Mario in.

“The best investment plan I ever had was him making that shot, so I doubled my salary,” Hall of Fame basketball coach Bill Self joked while sitting next to Mario Chalmers, famed for sinking that critical 3-pointer in the 2008 championship game against Memphis.

But Self, like Booth, also had a lesson to share about trust.

“I trust my guys,” the Hall of Fame basketball coach said. But that wasn’t always the case. He used to micromanage his players a lot more, he said. But eventually, he realized you can only control so much, and that “good players are harder to guard than good plays.”

Another piece of wisdom – “It’s a good shot or a bad shot when it leaves your hand,” not when it goes in the basket. That sounds a lot like some advice from a colleague that Booth repeats in his book: “Judge yourself by the quality of your decisions, not by their outcomes.”

photo by: Chris Crum/Contributed Photo

David Booth, Mario Chalmers and Bill Self take part in a panel discussion on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026, at KU’s conference center.

These lessons from Kansas sports don’t just fit in because they rhyme with Booth’s advice. They also fit because sports have been the focus of Booth’s philanthropy at KU.

For starters, there were the original 1891 “Rules of Basket Ball” penned by James Naismith, which Booth bought at auction in 2010 for $4.3 million and which went to the DeBruce Center next to Allen Fieldhouse. Then, there were two donations connected to David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium and the Gateway project, the latest a $300 million donation announced in 2025.

Why donate to athletics specifically?

“KU had done so much for me; I wanted to do something,” Booth told the crowd. “And I looked around and said, ‘How can I be of help?'” The answer was athletics, he said, in part because it’s hard to get state legislators to fund big sports facilities.

“Universities spend a whole bunch of money on athletics, and that support really has to come, I think, from the alums,” he said, not the state.

In “Stay Calm,” Booth writes about why Lawrence and KU are special to him. His parents, who grew up during the Great Depression, moved to Lawrence specifically to give their kids the chance to attend KU and get off to a good start in life. He mentions, too, the odd jobs he did in Lawrence as a youth: selling popcorn at football games, shelving books at the public library, selling shoes at Arensberg’s on Mass. Street.

When he comes to Lawrence now, he told the Journal-World, it’s “not like living in a big city where you’re kind of anonymous.”

“There is this feeling of community, that we kind of share something in common,” he said. “You’re either connected to the university directly or indirectly, you know?”

And he told the crowd on Thursday that that feeling motivated him as much as just wanting to repay KU.

“Part of it is payback,” he said, “but I love this place.”

‘Buy the market’

While Booth’s time in Lawrence and at KU left an imprint on him, it was at the University of Chicago where he’d be exposed to the then-cutting-edge economic ideas that he based his career around.

He arrived there in 1969, and there he encountered the “efficient market hypothesis.” This is a principle that implies, among other things, that unless you’re doing illicit things like insider trading, you can’t beat the market solely by analyzing information. In his book, Booth writes about studies done around this time that showed professional fund managers who actively picked their investments could not reliably outperform the market.

What Booth created after he left the University of Chicago was a firm that used index investing, a method based on that research. He recounts in his book the story of the early years of Dimensional Fund Advisors, which started in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn. And he writes about a 1983 New York Times article where it was listed as a successful “boutique” money management firm.

However, it was the only one in that article that was using index investing. The others were using the older style of money management, called “active management,” which is where someone at the firm actually chooses the investments, rather than using an index or portfolio to “buy the market.”

Booth told the Journal-World that this approach makes sense, because you’re benefiting from all of the other bets and transactions that people are making.

“In some sense, the market’s doing the work for you,” he said. “All these sophisticated investors and buyers and sellers, they’re out there setting prices. Any time an institutional investor sees prices deviate from what they think is a fair price, they jump all over it. So you as the individual investor can sit back and say, ‘Let these guys duke it out! The net result is something really positive for me!’

“I’ve been working for 50 years on trying to explain that in a way that’s intuitive to people,” he said.

Some people have what he calls the “MBA Syndrome.” They’ve gotten an impression of what a trader should be like, and they let their own successes go to their heads. And that doesn’t change even when they see the research about individuals not being able to consistently beat the market.

“Sure, there are a few people who beat the market, but fewer than you expect by chance,” he said. A rational person would look at this and say, “Oh, you can’t separate skill from luck, because there are too few winners.”

But for the patient with MBA Syndrome, “the darnedest thing happens.”

“People conclude, ‘There’s so few people who can beat the market; I know I can do it; that just shows how clever I am, because there’s so few people like me who can beat the market!”

On the other extreme, there are the anxious investors – the ones who are unnerved by the market’s swings and want to get out when it dips. It’s these investors he really wants to reach with his writing, and his simple message is to take the long view and trust the data.

“We have a lot of anxiety now, and that anxiety, uncontrolled, leads into pessimism,” he said. “But if you look, we have good, high-quality, research-quality data of 100 years of stock and bond returns. Do you think the amount of anxiety now is greater than during the Great Depression? During World War II? During the Great Recession?

“So, first off, let’s get a check on this – it’s not all that unusual. Second thing is, there’s not much correlation between people’s anxiety and stock and bond returns, to me.”

He gave an example from the first quarter of 2020, when the COVID pandemic hit and the stock market fell. Some people’s instincts were, “Holy cow, I’ve got to get out!” he said. But by the end of the year, the market had rebounded.

If you had $100 invested at the start of that year, Booth said, and got out when the market was down 20%, you’d then have $80. But if you kept it in and the year ended 20% up from where it started, “that means the last nine months of the year, you went from $80 to $120! That’s a 50% return!”

“There’s no do-overs in the investment business,” Booth said. “There’s no mulligans, as they say in golf. If you missed out on that 50% run, you missed out on it. We think of stocks over the long haul as having about a 10% return, but you have to be there to be assured of getting it. And if you miss out on one of those 50% runs, there’s a huge effect long-term.”

One way to dispel doubt, Booth said, is to ask, “‘Is there still a lot of trading going on?” If there is, then “that’s all you need to know,” because that tells you that lots of buyers still expect that their transactions will give them a positive outcome.

Booth also wants investors to know that this doesn’t work for individual stocks, but for the market as a whole. “The stock market is not going to zero,” he said. “Individual stock prices can.”

But he thinks there are many ways now to “buy the whole stock market” that didn’t exist back when his firm was getting started.

“The best evidence,” he said, shows “that you get a fair deal. There will be ups and downs; nothing’s perfect. But for people like my parents, who viewed themselves as outsiders and thought that insiders made all the money, that just is not true, because everybody can buy the market.”

Execution counts

Just like he trusts in the market, Booth trusts in KU and Lawrence to keep growing. When asked what he appreciates about Lawrence that others might not notice, Booth said that “it’s a city that can change.”

“I’ve lived in smaller cities in Kansas,” said Booth – whose childhood home before the move was Garnett, current population about 3,200 – “and you go back and it’s still pretty much kind of the same stores and same people.”

Not Lawrence, and especially not KU, which has started big developments like its Crossing and Gateway projects in just the past few years.

“I mean, gosh, this Gateway thing totally changed everything. For the better,” Booth said. “I think it’s very exciting, and I just can’t believe that they’re going to pull it off.”

Was there a time when he needed convincing – back before the dream of a new stadium, when the Jayhawks were expected to win maybe one football game a year?

The answer has to do with optimism, which he devotes a whole chapter to in his book. It’s titled “Why I’ll Always Be Optimistic About the Future,” but he also writes, “I want to be clear that optimism isn’t the same as blind faith or willful naivete.”

“I don’t think I’m an optimist,” Booth told the Journal-World. “I think I’m a realist.”

His first donation to the football stadium in 2017 was a smaller commitment of $50 million spread across five years. This was seven years before the Gateway idea, which will include a hotel, retail development and student housing around the stadium. Back in 2017, the renovation was expected to cost $300 million in total.

Booth admits that this donation did take some faith.

“The first one, because KU had had 10 years of rough football results, everybody needed to chip in, so that was kind of blind faith,” he said. “That was blind optimism, I guess.”

After that, it was up to KU to show it could deliver.

“The critical ingredient there was an element of trust – let’s call it trust in execution,” Booth said. “As we say around our firm, ideas are cheap; execution is what really counts. It’s nice to have great ideas, but if you don’t trust that people can execute on them, they don’t go anywhere.

“The current structure, Chancellor (Doug) Girod, Travis Goff as athletic director, Dan Martin as head of Endowment, that’s a strong group. And over time they earned the trust – my trust, anyway – and that’s why I ended up doing a second contribution, because they showed they were trustworthy and they can execute.”

That second contribution would be touted as one of the largest in the history of college sports.

It was the $300 million donation announced in August 2025, right after the Lawrence City Commission approved a variety of financial incentives for the Gateway, and right before the first home game was played in the renovated David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium against Fresno State. The Jayhawks hadn’t gone to a bowl game in 2024, but the previous two years they’d had back-to-back bowl appearances, including their Guaranteed Rate Bowl victory in 2023.

Seventy-five million of Booth’s gift is for the second phase of the Gateway. The rest of the $300 million is to help KU deal with “continued changes in NCAA and conference dynamics” and the recent implementation of revenue sharing with athletes.

Booth said the Gateway has been a massive project, and one that people might not realize the difficulty of. “I mean, it’s huge! It’s city, state funding, alumni support, a heck of a deal.”

When it’s all finished, there should be a “ripple effect” that lifts the whole city, he thinks. He’s already seeing that in the new convention space. “I don’t think there’s a conference center comparable to the one they put in anywhere near here,” he said, and he heard the book launch was the first time the space had hosted a capacity crowd.

It’s seeing this that gives him confidence that bigger things are ahead for KU.

“You see the way it’s emerged and the quality of leadership and ability to execute, and all of a sudden I think it’s kind of an informed optimism,” Booth said.

“That’s what gives you hope.”