John C. Bogle

John Bogle was born on May 8, 1929, in Montclair, New Jersey[4] to William Yates Bogle, Jr. and Josephine Lorraine Hipkins.[5]

His family was affected by the Great Depression. They lost their money and had to sell their home, with his father falling into alcoholism which resulted in his parents' divorce.[6]

Bogle and his twin, David, attended Manasquan High School near the New Jersey shore for a time. Their academic record there enabled them to transfer to Blair Academy on work scholarships.[7] At Blair, Bogle showed a particular aptitude for mathematics, with numbers and computations fascinating him. In 1947, Bogle graduated from Blair Academy cum laude and was accepted at Princeton University, where he studied economics and investment. During his university years, Bogle studied the mutual fund industry. Bogle spent his junior and senior years working on his thesis "The Economic Role of the Investment Company".[8]

Bogle graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1951 and was soon hired by Walter L. Morgan, reportedly as a result of Morgan reading his 130-page thesis paper.[9]

After graduating from Princeton, Bogle narrowed his career options to banking and investments. He was hired at Wellington Fund and promoted to an assistant manager position in 1955, where he obtained a broader access to analyze the company and the investment department. Bogle demonstrated initiative and creativity by challenging the Wellington management to change its strategy of concentration on a single fund, and did his best to make his point in creating a new fund. Eventually, he succeeded, and the new fund became a turning point in his career. After successfully climbing through the ranks, in 1970 he replaced Morgan as chairman of Wellington, but was later fired for an "extremely unwise" merger that he approved. It was a poor decision that he considers his biggest mistake, stating, "The great thing about that mistake, which was shameful and inexcusable and a reflection of immaturity and confidence beyond what the facts justified, was that I learned a lot."[10]

In 1974, Bogle founded the Vanguard Company which is now one of the most respected and successful companies in the investment world. In 1999, Fortune magazine named Bogle as "one of the four investment giants of the twentieth century".[11]

In 1976, influenced by the works of Paul Samuelson, Bogle founded First Index Investment Trust (a precursor to the Vanguard 500 Index Fund) as the first index mutual fund available to the general public. In a 2005 speech, Samuelson ranked "this Bogle invention along with the invention of the wheel, the alphabet, Gutenberg printing".[12]

Bogle had heart problems in the 1990s and, in 1996, he relinquished his role as Vanguard CEO to John J. Brennan, his handpicked successor and second-in-command whom he had hired in 1982. Bogle had a successful heart transplant in 1996. His subsequent return to Vanguard with the title of senior chairman led to conflict between Bogle and Brennan. Bogle left the company in 1999 and moved to Bogle Financial Markets Research Center, a small research institute not directly connected to Vanguard but on the Vanguard campus.[13]

Bogle's innovative idea was creating the world's first index mutual fund in 1975. Bogle's idea was that instead of beating the index and charging high costs, the index fund would mimic the index performance over the long run—thus achieving higher returns with lower costs than the costs associated with actively managed funds.[14]

Bogle's idea of index investing offers a clear yet prominent distinction between investment and speculations. The main difference between investment and speculation lies in the time horizon and the risk of capital. Investment is concerned with capturing returns on the long-run with lower risk of destruction of capital, while speculation is concerned with achieving returns over a short period of time, with potentially destructive risk to capital. The speculator is often only concerned with the price of a security and not the underlying business as a whole, the investor is concerned with the underlying business and not the price of the security. Even if a business is steady in cash flow, the market quotations of a security are anything but, as a result of speculators driving up prices and bringing down prices based on hope, fear and greed. Bogle believed this is an important analysis to be taken into account as short-term, risky investments have been flooding the financial markets.[15]

Bogle is known for his insistence, in numerous media appearances and in writing, on the superiority of index funds over traditional actively managed mutual funds. He contends that it is folly to attempt to pick actively managed mutual funds and expect their performance to beat a low-cost index fund over a long period of time, after accounting for the fees that actively managed funds charge.[12]

Bogle argued for an approach to investing defined by simplicity and common sense. Below are his eight basic rules for investors:[16]

1. Select low-cost funds
2. Consider carefully the added costs of advice
3. Do not overrate past fund performance
4. Use past performance to determine consistency and risk
5. Beware of stars (as in, star mutual fund managers)
6. Beware of asset size
7. Don't own too many funds
8. Buy your fund portfolio – and hold it

Later in his life, Bogle expressed concerns that the growing popularity of passive indexing would lead to a concentration of corporate voting power for leaders of the three largest investment firms (Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street), adding: "I do not believe that such a concentration would serve the national interest."[17]

Bogle married Eve Sherrerd on September 22, 1956, and had six children: Barbara, Jean, John Clifton, Nancy, Sandra, and Andrew. They resided in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

At age 31, Bogle suffered from his first of several heart attacks, and at age 38, he was diagnosed with the rare heart disease arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia. He received a heart transplant in 1996 at age 66.[18][19]

Bogle was a member of the board of trustees at Blair Academy. He was an advisory board member of the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance at the Columbia Law School. Bogle received honorary doctorates from Princeton University in 2005[20] and Villanova University in 2011.[21] Bogle served on the board of trustees of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a museum dedicated to the U.S. Constitution. He had previously served as chairman of the board from 1999 through 2007.[22] He was named chairman emeritus in January 2007, when former president George H. W. Bush was named chairman.

Politically, Bogle was a Republican, although he voted for Bill Clinton, for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012,[23] and for Hillary Clinton in 2016.[24] He supported the Volcker rule and tighter rules on money market funds, and was critical of what he believed was the US government's lack of regulation of the financial sector. Bogle said the current system in the US had "gotten out of balance", and advocated for "taxes to discourage short-term speculation, limits on leverage, transparency for financial derivatives, stricter punishments for financial crimes, and a unified fiduciary standard for all money managers".[23] In 2017, Bogle stated that President Donald Trump's policies were good for the market in the short-term, but dangerous for society as a whole in the long term.[25]

Bogle died on January 16, 2019, at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.[26][27]

During his high-earning years at Vanguard, he regularly gave half his salary to charity, including Blair Academy and Princeton. In 2016, the Bogle Fellowship was established at Princeton University by John C. Bogle Jr, Bogle's son. The fellowship sponsors 20 first year students in each class.[13]

• Named one of the investment industry's four "Giants of the 20th Century" by Fortune magazine in 1999.[28]
• Awarded the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University for "distinguished achievement in the Nation's service" (1999).
• Named one of the "world's 100 most powerful and influential people" by Time magazine in 2004.[29]
• Institutional Investor's Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).[22][30]

• Bogle on Mutual Funds: New Perspectives for the Intelligent Investor (McGraw-Hill, 1993), ISBN 1-55623-860-6
• Slater, Robert. The Vanguard Experiment: John Bogle's Quest to Transform the Mutual Fund Industry. Chicago, IL: Irwin Professional Publishing, Inc., 1997.
• Rostad, Knut A. The Man in the Arena, Vanguard Founder John C. Bogle and His Lifelong Battle to Serve Investors First. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken, N.J. 2013.
• Braham, Lewis. The House That Jack Built: how John Bogle and Vanguard reinvented the mutual fund industry. McGraw-Hill, 2011.
• Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor (John Wiley & Sons, 1999), ISBN 0-471-39228-6
• John Bogle on Investing: The First 50 Years (McGraw-Hill, 2000), ISBN 0-07-136438-2
• Character Counts: The Creation and Building of The Vanguard Group (McGraw-Hill, 2002) ISBN 0-07-139115-0
• The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2005), ISBN 0-300-10990-3
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (John Wiley & Sons, 2007), ISBN 978-0-470-10210-7
• Enough : True Measures of Money, Business, and Life (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), ISBN 978-0-470-39851-7
• Common Sense on Mutual Funds: Fully Updated 10th Anniversary Edition (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), ISBN 0-470-13813-0
• Don't Count on it!: Reflections on Investment Illusions, Capitalism, "Mutual" Funds, Indexing, Entrepreneurship, Idealism, and Heroes (John Wiley & Sons, 2010) ISBN 978-0-470-64396-9
• The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation (John Wiley & Sons, 2012) ISBN 978-1118122778
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns 10th Anniversary Edition, Updated and Revised (John Wiley & Sons, 2017), ISBN 978-1-119-40450-7
• Stay the Course: The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution (John Wiley & Sons, 2018) ISBN 978-1119404309

Wikiquote has quotations related to: John C. Bogle

• Official website
• John C. Bogle Papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University
• Remarks before the Harvard Club of Boston, January 14, 2003
• Venture Voice podcast interview, February 23, 2006
• "Books of Our Time" interview with John Bogle, January 2007
• Roberts, Russ (April 9, 2007). "Bogle on Investing". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.
• Video: Speech at Pepperdine University
• Investopedia Profile
• That's Why They Call It Vanguard – Bloomberg
• John C. Bogle at Find a Grave