John Clifton "Jack" Bogle (born May 8, 1929) is an American investor, business magnate, and philanthropist. He is the founder and retired chief executive of The Vanguard Group.
Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.
I'd be the first to agree that capitalism bestows its blessings unevenly. But that wouldn't persuade me to think it was a good idea to do away with those blessings in their entirety. That said, there is lots of work to be done to make capitalism work better, and to broaden its blessings far more widely not only in America, but all over the globe.
Successful investing is about owning businesses and reaping the huge rewards provided by the dividends and earnings growth of our nation's - and, for that matter, the world's - corporations.
Surprise! The returns reported by mutual funds aren't actually earned by mutual fund investors.
If your fund doesn't last for the long term, how can you invest for the long term?
Among my greatest disappointments about the mutual fund industry - in addition to excessive costs and excessive focus on the short-term - is that fund managers have been passive participants in corporate governance.
Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts, and in part on your ability to realize at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike that this too shall pass.
We live in a very risky world and investors should not get "carried away" with excessive allocations to equities, or for that matter, real estate. As always asset allocation and low cost and broad diversification will be essential in earning one's fair share of whatever returns our financial markets are generous enough to bestow upon us.
The returns we read about in the industry sales literature vastly diminish when we move from the theoretical world of market indexes to the real world of actually investing.
Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.
I believe that the mutual fund industry's biggest shortcoming is too much focus on the momentary price of a stock - an illusion - and too little focus on the intrinsic value of the corporation - the ultimate reality. I'm comforted by the fact that Warren Buffett feels the same way.
It's 1450 out of 1500 ETF funds that I just wouldn't touch because they're not diversified enough. Or they have some huge speculative twist to them that if you can guess the markets right you will do very well for a day or two but who can do that? Nobody.
Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong.
The multiple failings of our flawed financial sector are jeopardizing, not only the retirement security of our nation's savers but the economy in which our entire society participates.
My biggest prediction for the future is that people are going to start looking after individual investors.
The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. Yet market timing appears to be increasingly embraced by mutual fund investors and the professional managers of fund portfolios alike.
While I haven't read economist Robin Hahnel's work, replacing capitalism would be at the very bottom of my list of priorities - to be considered only after everything else had been tried. Improving our capitalistic system however, is at the top of my list and is of course the major theme of "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism. "
The business has some problems, substantial problems. You go fix it, you young people. That's what you're there for. Don't believe what the old generation tells you. We don't know a damn thing, including Bogle.
Without getting into brothels, there are ethical capitalists the problem is that there aren't enough of them. It is not "just a few bad apples" that have been evident in our corporations, our investment bankers and our mutual funds, but so many that one has to concede that the barrel itself needs some work.
Thomas Aquinas defined the human soul as the core of our being, and the power that brings our characteristics into unity so the soul of capitalism - in its own temporal world as contrasted to the spiritual world of human beings - is what defines the core of the system and the factors that unify to produce the wonderful world that we are blessed to live in.