Rex Sinquefield

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.

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.

Rex Sinquefield has been deeply involved in efforts to privatize the St. Louis Lambert International Airport. He split with Travis Brown, his former consultant, following the ballot initiative's withdrawal in 2020.

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

In 2018, Sinquefield and his wife donated $50 million to Saint Louis University as part of the university's bicentennial celebration. The gift helped to fund a new Saint Louis University Research Institute and fund the construction of a new Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering building on SLU's campus. The gift was the largest single donation in Saint Louis University's history.

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.

In 2016, BBC News reported that Sinquefield, who likes chess “so much he's put tens of millions of dollars into the game,” turned St. Louis into a chess capital because he believes that chess can transform children and their academic lives.

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.

Sinquefield also gave money to the group Kansans for No Income Tax which helped governor Sam Brownback lower the state income tax in 2012. Dubbed the Kansas experiment, this policy decreased state revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars; caused spending on roads, bridges, and education to be slashed; and failed to lift Kansas' below-average economic growth. In 2017, the Republican-controlled Legislature of Kansas voted to roll back the cuts and overrode Brownback's veto.

On January 5, 2011, Let Voters Decide submitted nine initiative petitions to the Missouri Secretary of State calling for a repeal of the state's income tax – with a top rate of six percent. The petitions also called for a higher sales tax, capped at seven percent, that would be applied to virtually any good or service transaction involving individuals. Sinquefield and Let Voters Decide President Travis Brown say that replacing the income tax with a sales tax would help create jobs, promote economic development and make state revenue collection less volatile. In 2014, Missouri lowered its income tax rate.

Local control, the Proposition A ballot initiative, received broad support, including St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, and the Missouri Democratic Party On February 22, 2011, the House of Representatives passed House Bill 71, the local measure in that body, by a vote of 109–46. The bill went on the Senate,Senate Bill 23, which failed. Thus the ballot initiative was filed and on November 6, 2012, Proposition A passed with 63.9% to 36.1%.

He is the primary financial supporter of the Let Voters Decide committee. In 2010, the committee placed a statewide initiative on the Missouri ballot. Called Proposition A, it would prevent all Missouri communities except Kansas City and St. Louis from imposing earnings taxes. It would also allow Kansas City and St. Louis voters to vote on whether to retain their earnings taxes. Missourians passed proposition A with a large margin – 68.4% YES / 31.6% NO (1,294,911 YES votes to 598,010 NO votes).

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. 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.

In 2009, Sinquefield and his wife gave $1 million to the University of Missouri's School of Music. Those funds were used to create the New Music Initiative, an effort designed to encourage young people to become composers and to support new works of music composition. Sinquefield has contributed to the St. Vincent Home for Children.

In 2007, Rex Sinquefield opened the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis, a non-profit organization. An educational organization, its mission is to "maintain a formal program of instruction to teach the game of chess and to promote and support its educational program through community outreach and local and national partnerships to increase the awareness of the educational value of chess." In August 2010, Sinquefield provided seed funding to move the World Chess Hall of Fame to St. Louis, citing the Chess Club's presence and reputation. The Sinquefield Cup is named after him.

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

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.

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. He was spot on.

Sinquefield worked at the American National Bank of Chicago, developing, in 1973, the first S&P 500 passively managed index fund. Seven years later, the fund managed $12 billion.

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. At the time, he owned $200 worth of one stock. During the Vietnam War, he served as a “high-end gopher” in the finance corps at Fort Riley, as he put it. Working with top-secret records, he found it “easy, boring, safe and a terrible waste of manpower.” He majored in business for his undergraduate degree from Saint Louis University and received an MBA from University of Chicago.

Rex Andrew Sinquefield (/ˈsɪŋkfiːld/; 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; his two main interests being rolling back the income tax and increasing public funding for charter schools.

Sinquefield supported the successful effort to return local control of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to the City of St. Louis. Since 1861, the police department had been run by a five-person board that included four gubernatorial appointees.