Dean LeBaron, Founder of Batterymarch and Pioneer of Global Investing, Dies

SARASOTA, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dean LeBaron, the founder of Batterymarch Financial Management and one of the most seminal figures in modern institutional investing, died July 14 at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida, of heart failure. He was 92.

Mr. LeBaron founded Batterymarch in Boston in 1969 and built it into one of the world's most influential investment firms. By the mid-1980s, its roughly 40 employees managed 2.5 percent of the entire U.S. stock market, a share equivalent to $1.4 trillion today, by the reckoning of investment analyst Robert Arnott.

Mr. LeBaron introduced index funds to the institutional investment market three years before Jack Bogle brought them to consumers, and he was the first institutional investor to use computers to manage portfolios.

"In the investment field," Mr. LeBaron liked to say, "you should be where everyone else is not." He proved it: he was the first institutional investor in most of the world's emerging markets, including China, and among the first to invest institutional money in American farmland. He was an early advocate for shareholder rights, speaking out when he believed corporate managers were shortchanging the investors who owned their companies. The stand cost him clients among executives who preferred quieter money managers.

In 1989, the Gorbachev government invited him to help privatize the Soviet military-industrial complex. That effort came to an end when the Soviet Union dissolved into Russia, and the new Russian government demanded bribes for him to continue his work. Mr. LeBaron refused to pay the bribes and left Russia. He recounted those years in Mao, Marx & the Market: Capitalist Adventures in Russia and China (Wiley), written with the collaborator he later married, his wife, Donna Carpenter LeBaron.

In 2001, the CFA Institute named him the seventh recipient of its Award for Professional Excellence, the organization's highest honor, whose earlier recipients included Sir John Templeton and Warren Buffett.

After selling Batterymarch to Legg Mason in 1995, he divided his time between Boston, Florida, New Hampshire, and Switzerland.

Before founding Batterymarch, Mr. LeBaron served as director of research at Keystone, where he managed the Keystone Custodian Growth Fund, and as director of research at F.S. Moseley & Company.

Mr. LeBaron was a graduate of Harvard College (1955) and Harvard Business School (1960), where he was a Baker Scholar. In 1993, the business school honored him with its Alumni Achievement Award, its highest recognition of graduates.

With his friends Charles Ellis and John McArthur, a former dean of the school, he founded the LeBaron-McArthur-Ellis Fellowship in 1983, which has since supported the education of hundreds of students.

He is survived by his wife, Donna Carpenter LeBaron; his children, Stacy and Blake LeBaron; and five grandchildren, Rachel Perry, Scott Perry, and Glennie, Hannah, and Leah LeBaron.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that contributions be made to the Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation, designated for the Heart Failure Program.