Words matter. These are the best John C. Bogle Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The rewards of my life have been great. I built a company; I left things better than I found them. I have a good reputation. I put the Vanguard shareholders and crew first. That’s a huge thing.
I think high turnover is definitively the investor’s enemy, so you don’t want to bring a high-turnover philosophy to this business. You want to have a long-term philosophy.
I learned you work for what you get, and I feel sorry for people who haven’t had that upbringing.
When you’re young, you’ve got plenty of time to recover from your mistakes.
There’s no such thing as wealth without risk.
When our financial system – essentially our money managers, marketers of investment products and stockbrokers – put up zero percent of the capital and assume zero percent of the risk yet receive fully 80% of the return, something has gone terribly wrong in our financial system.
What indexing does is neutralize a large part of the stock market. There’s no trading in those stocks, or almost none.
The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.
Successful investing is all about common sense.
If we wanted something, we had to earn it.
I seek the truth.
I would advise someone who has just retired to be something in the broad range of 50/50 stocks and bonds.
I think average investors should not trade a lot. The evidence is overpowering. The more you trade, the less you earn.
Our financial system is driven by a giant marketing machine in which the interests of sellers directly conflict with the interests of buyers.
Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It is a high-risk, high-reward proposition.
My incentive in starting Vanguard, I’m very blunt about this, it was my means of preserving my career. That’s a very selfish thing.
Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that’s essentially the idea behind the index fund.
I do think that impact investing is not that effective. Shares go from investor A to investor B, and the company doesn’t even know it. It’s inevitably an ineffective way to communicate to the company your feelings.
Well, I like regulation as little as anybody else. It can be intrusive. It can be detailed. It can be bureaucratic. It can be unevenly administered. It can be unfair. But most regulations that we have for mutual funds and for banks are regulations that we earned. We did something wrong and we’re paying a price for it.
New ideas that fly in the face of conventional wisdom of the day are always greeted with doubt and scorn, even fear.
There is no country like the United States, with its diversified industrial base, technology leadership, innovation and strong pressure to build companies to make them grow.
Entrepreneurs or international conglomerateurs, or large financial institutions buy or create mutual fund management companies to create a return on their own capital. It’s capitalism at work, where the rewards tend to go to the managers rather than the investors.
The malfeasance and misjudgments by our corporate, financial and government leaders, declining ethical standards, and the failure of our new agency society reflect a failure of capitalism.
They were tough times and I started working when I was 10 years old, delivering papers and eventually becoming a waiter.
U.S. companies are innovative and entrepreneurial.
In an ideal world, Adam Smith-like, individuals would recognize what they need to do in their own self-interest, and they will make changes happen and look after themselves.
The index fund always gives you the market return.
Vanguard never would have happened if I hadn’t been fired as CEO of Wellington Management Company, the firm that did the investing for the Wellington fund and eight sister funds.
It is the power of words and books – explaining and dramatizing great ideas and articulating high ideals – that is the greatest weapon in the missionary’s arsenal.
In investing, you get what you don’t pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won’t be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.
Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.
I almost hate to say how proud I am of my career and, most of all, helping folks get the returns they deserve.
Net return is simply the gross return of your investment portfolio less the costs you incur. Keep your investment expenses low, for the tyranny of compounding costs can devastate the miracle of compounding returns.
If you were to just design the perfect retirement plan, you would own the stock market or you would own the bond market. You would get all the costs or all that you possibly could out of the system. So on an annual basis, if the market went up 8 percent, you would get 7.8 or 7.9 percent.
Mutual funds with superior performance records often falter.
If you put nothing away for retirement, I can tell you, to the last penny, how much you will have when you retire: nothing.
I had done some work on index funds in my senior thesis at Princeton in 1951.
I spend about half of my time wondering why I have so much in stocks and about half wondering why I have so little.
My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn’t have a sou.
Never underrate the importance of asset allocation.
We do some things for family reasons. If it’s not consistent, well, life isn’t always consistent.
With actively managed funds, people have big behavior problems. With funds that have done well, they put their money in, and when it has done bad, they want to take it out.
The average hedge fund manager is going to earn zero per cent in extra return.
When a door closes, if you look long enough and hard enough, if you’re strong enough, you’ll find a window that opens.
I’ve usually used the phrase ‘stay the course’ as one of the great rules of investment success.
