Robin Wigglesworth - Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever

WARREN BUFFETT. Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and the worlds most famous investor. Won the investment industrys bet of the century by pitting an index fund against a panoply of hedge funds.

TED SEIDES. The cofounder of Protg Partners, a hedge fund investment firm, who took Buffett up on his bet that an index fund could beat the finest money managers in the world over a decade.

JACK BOGLE. The founder of Vanguard, one of the biggest index fund managers in the world, and often dubbed Saint Jack due to his exhortation for the investment industry to give more people a fair shake through cheap passive investment vehicles.

LOUIS BACHELIER. An early-twentieth-century French mathematician who died in obscurity, but whose work on the random walk of stocks would make him the intellectual godfather of passive investing.

ALFRED COWLES III. The wealthy tuberculosis-plagued heir of a newspaper fortune who undertook one of the first rigorous studies of how well investment professionals actually performed versus the broader stock market.

JAMES LORIE. A gregarious University of Chicago professor tasked by Merrill Lynch to find out the long-term return of stocks. The result was the biggest and most comprehensive study of the equity market to date, providing the raw fuel for the development of index funds.

HARRY MARKOWITZ. The cerebral economist whose groundbreaking 1952 PhD thesis on financial markets became one of the most influential papers in finance, winning him the Nobel Prize in Economics, and laying the groundwork for the subsequent passive investment revolution.

WILLIAM SHARPE. A onetime medical student who became one of the first programmer-economists, building on his mentor Markowitzs work to demonstrate the power of a broad market portfolioin other words, an index fund.

EUGENE FAMA. A onetime jock turned legendary economist at the University of Chicago, whose efficient-markets hypothesis helped explain why markets are so hard to beat, and inspired the birth of passive investing.

JOHN MCQUOWN. A ferociously determined, computer-obsessed banker who convinced Wells Fargo to establish a skunk works and assemble the biggest crew of economic superstars. They would go on to launch the first passive investment fund, which reshaped finance.

REX SINQUEFIELD. A former Fama student who became the self-styled Ayatollah of the efficient-markets hypothesis, establishing the first S&P 500 index fund at American National Bank of Chicago. He would later go on to found Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) with McQuowns protg David Booth.

DEAN LEBARON. A resolutely unorthodox money manager who made his name in the go-go stock market boom of the 1960s, but established one of the first index funds at his firm Batterymarcheven if it initially found no takers.

JIM VERTIN. The head of research at Wells Fargos trust department. He was initially a ferocious opponent of McQuown, but eventually became a convert to the cause and a zealous proselytizer for passive investing.

WILLIAM FOUSE. A mustachioed bon vivant who put himself through university by playing jazz. After being pushed out of Mellon Bank, he became an instrumental bridge between the cutting-edge research of McQuowns skunk works and the rest of Wells Fargos investment department.

JIM RIEPE. Bogles main lieutenant at Wellington, who followed him over in the great bifurcation and the founding of Vanguard and played a pivotal role in the launch of the First Index Investment Trust.

JAN TWARDOWSKI. Bogles young quant, who helped design Vanguards inaugural index mutual fund using a now-defunct programming language. Despite the fund initially bombing with investors, he was able to make sure that it didnt deviate too far from its index.

BURTON MALKIEL. An economist whose book A Random Walk Down Wall Street popularized many of the theories developed by the likes of Fama. He would later become a board member at Vanguard, and the chair of the American Stock Exchanges (Amex) new products division, which invented the exchange-traded fund (ETF).

JACK BRENNAN. A patrician Bostonian who was Bogles trusted lieutenant and successor, and who proved instrumental in building Vanguard into a huge investment group. But the two men fell out dramatically, leading to a bout of strife that threatened to blow Vanguard off course.

DAVID BOOTH. A basketball-loving Kansan who dropped out of Chicagos PhD program to work for John McQuown at Wells Fargo. He then founded DFA with fellow former Fama student Rex Sinquefield, and helped extend the index fund revolution to new frontiers.

LARRY KLOTZ. One of AG Beckers top salesmen who joined Booth and Sinquefield in founding DFA, winning many of its first big clients before he was summarily ejected by his two partners.

JEANNE SINQUEFIELD. Rex Sinquefields brilliant and exacting wife, who went from a PhD in sociology to designing financial derivatives, and then became head of trading at DFA. Every new recruit had to pass her Jeanne Test.

DAN WHEELER. A loquacious former Marine turned financial advisor, who helped build up DFAs retail operations and established its boot camps, which helped spread the gospel of efficient markets to new corners of the financial industry.