Remembering John “Mac” McQuown, Whose Curiosity Drove a Life of Innovation
John “Mac” McQuown, a founding Director of Dimensional Fund Advisors in 1981, was a financial engineer, entrepreneur, and environmentalist with an insatiable curiosity and relentless drive that led him to start more than a dozen companies in his lifetime.
A self-described “data dog,” Mac was a pioneer in the transformation of investing from guesswork into a science guided by academic research.
In the 1970s, he assembled a team at Wells Fargo Bank that developed one of the first index funds—the investment vehicle whose rise would later revolutionize the financial world. And after helping launch Dimensional, Mac remained on the company’s board while he pursued interests that ranged from bond-investing innovations to sustainable farming to wine making. He died on October 22, 2024, at age 90. He is survived by his wife, Leslie, his son, Morgan, and his daughter-in-law, Alexa.
“To bring about fundamental change, you need great thinkers and researchers, but you also need implementers,” Dimensional Founder David Booth told Bloomberg Markets magazine in 2015. “People like Mac don’t win Nobel Prizes; they implement the ideas of the guys who do.” The descriptions of his life in this article are based on years of written and recorded recollections from Dimensional employees and others associated with the firm, except where otherwise noted.
