Vanguard Founder Quotes

Three things saved us: Our unwavering 50% savings rate. Avoiding debt. We’ve never even had a car payment. Finally embracing the indexing lessons Jack Bogle—the founder of The Vanguard Group and the inventor of index funds—perfected 40 years ago.

Many of the best and most conspicuous examples of strategic principles come from companies that were founded on them, companies such as eBay, Dell, Vanguard, Southwest Airlines, and Wal-Mart (“Low prices, every day”). The founders of those companies espoused a clear guiding principle that summarized the essence of what would become a full-blown business strategy.

When Rich People Do Stupid Things March, 2011 Enough. That's the title of Vanguard founder John Bogle's book about measuring what counts in life.

All journalists stand on the shoulders of giants, whether they admit it or not. In many cases, my book was vastly enhanced by the superlative work of other journalists, writers, and financial historians, who have themselves explored some of the subjects and themes I have tried to knit together in one sweeping narrative. Peter Bernstein is a huge inspiration, and his books were of tremendous help for some of the earlier chapters, as was Colin Read’s The Efficient Market Hypothesists. Lewis Braham’s biography of Jack Bogle is essential reading for anyone interested in the tumultuous life of Vanguard’s founder. Ralph Lehman’s The Elusive Trade was exhaustively detailed on the genesis of ETFs, and Anthony Bianco’s The Big Lie vividly tells the story of WFIA/BGI in the Pattie Dunn era. I have also learned an enormous amount from working with or admiring from afar financial journalists like John Authers, Gillian Tett, James Mackintosh, Philip Coggan, and Jason Zweig, as well as industry experts such as Deborah Fuhr, Ben Johnson, Eric Balchunas, and David Nadig. They are all titans upon whose shoulders I nervously perch.

Although the framing was deliberately provocative, it is undeniably true that index funds are free riders on the work done by active managers, which has an aggregate societal value—something even Jack Bogle admitted. If everyone merely invested passively, the outcome would be “chaos, catastrophe,” Bogle noted a few years before passing away. “There would be no trading. There would be no way to turn a stream of income into a pile of capital or a pile of capital into a stream of income,” Vanguard’s founder observed in 2017.20 Bogle rightly pointed out that the likelihood of such a scenario—where everyone was merely invested in an index fund—was zero.

The Bogle Boys. Vanguard’s founder Jack Bogle always had a young assistant to mentor, and every year all past and present assistants would have a boozy Christmas dinner with their boss. From top left to right: Jeremy Duffield, Jim Riepe, Daniel Butler, Jan Twardowski, Duncan McFarland. From bottom left to right: Jack Brennan, Tim Buckley, Jack Bogle, Jim Norris.

John Bogle, the Vanguard founder who passed away in 2019, once told a story about money that highlights something we don’t think about enough: At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

Men are vanguards and it is reflected in the ratio between men and women on WhiteDate,” the page begins. “So gentlemen, don’t be shy and invite white ladies in real life who display trad potential.” Trad is short for “traditional”—meaning someone willing to hew to the antiquated gender roles beloved of white supremacists. Users of the site are encouraged to print out a mini-flyer that says: You look like one of us. Join us on WHITEDATE.NET. Our survival is as important as the survival of the Siberian Tiger. “We have started to present this mini-flyer with a ‘Hi!’ and a smile, letting the ladies read and memorize it, then taking it back,” write the anonymous founders of the site. “Walk away and present the same flyer to the next one that crosses our way. Even if she is not the ideal woman for you, she might be for one of your white brethren.