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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.
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J.L. Collins (The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life)
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Bogle’s brilliance, for us investors, was to shift the ownership of his new company to the mutual funds it operates. Since we investors own those funds, through our ownership of shares in them, we in effect own Vanguard.
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J.L. Collins (The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life)
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The creation of Vanguard and its truly mutual (fund-shareholder-owned) structure has been the so-far-single counterexample to this pattern. I explain why this structure has worked so well, and why it must ultimately become the dominant structure in the industry.
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John C. Bogle (The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation)
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One of the problems with a 529 plan is that you must give up an element of control. The best 529 plans available, and my second choice to an ESA, is a “flexible” plan. This type of plan allows you to move your investment around periodically within a certain family of funds. A family of funds is a brand name of mutual fund. You could pick from virtually any mutual fund in the American Funds Group or Vanguard or Fidelity. You are stuck in one brand, but you can choose the type of fund, the amount in each, and move it around if you want. This is the only type of 529 I recommend.
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Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
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Strategy involves creating “fit” among a company’s activities. Fit has to do with the ways a company’s activities interact and reinforce one another. For example, Vanguard Group aligns all of its activities with a low-cost strategy; it distributes funds directly to consumers and minimizes portfolio turnover. Fit drives both competitive advantage and sustainability: when activities mutually reinforce each other, competitors can’t easily imitate them. When Continental Lite tried to match a few of Southwest Airlines’ activities, but not the whole interlocking system, the results were disastrous.
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Michael E. Porter (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy)
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Can you think of another business in the world that would continue to exist as a going concern even after it had been proven definitively—as John Bogle of Vanguard proved about the financial industry—that most of its products are vastly inferior to other, cheaper alternatives like index funds? I can’t. How about a business whose most prestigious firms have been caught defrauding their own customers not once, but over and over again? In the normal corporate world, would such a business not only continue to operate, but actually make more and more money every year? Of course not. It would be long dead by now. And yet deceiving its clients and foisting inferior and even fraudulent products on them is exactly how Wall Street stays in business!
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Scott Fearon (Dead Companies Walking: How a Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places)
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The most popular intermediate-term bond fund, among those advisers monitored by the Hulbert Financial Digest who have beaten the S&P 500 over the past 15 years, is the Vanguard Intermediate-Term Investment-Grade Fund, which charges annual fees of 0.20%, or $20 per $10,000 invested.
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Anonymous
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What does this mean in practical terms? Let’s keep things simple, ignore private equity and commercial real estate, and focus just on the broad stock and bond market. You might buy three funds: an index fund offering exposure to the entire U.S. stock market, an index fund that will give you exposure to both developed foreign stock markets and emerging stock markets, and an index fund that owns the broad U.S. bond market. Suppose we were aiming to build a classic balanced portfolio, with 60 percent in stocks and 40 percent in bonds. Here are some possible investment mixes using index funds offered by major financial firms: 40 percent Fidelity Spartan Total Market Index Fund, 20 percent Fidelity Spartan Global ex U.S. Index Fund and 40 percent Fidelity Spartan U.S. Bond Index Fund. You can purchase these mutual funds directly from Fidelity Investments (Fidelity.com). 40 percent Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, 20 percent Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund and 40 percent Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund. You can buy these mutual funds directly from Vanguard Group (Vanguard.com). 40 percent Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF, 20 percent Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US ETF and 40 percent Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF. You can purchase these ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, through a discount or full-service brokerage firm. You can learn more about each of the funds at Vanguard.com. 40 percent iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF, 20 percent iShares Core MSCI Total International Stock ETF and 40 percent iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF. You can buy these ETFs through a brokerage account and find fund details at iShares.com. 40 percent SPDR Russell 3000 ETF, 20 percent SPDR MSCI ACWI ex-US ETF and 40 percent SPDR Barclays Aggregate Bond ETF. You can invest in these ETFs through a brokerage account and learn more at SPDRs.com. 40 percent Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund, 20 percent Schwab International Index Fund and 40 percent Schwab Total Bond Market Fund. You can buy these mutual funds directly from Charles Schwab (Schwab.com). The good news: Schwab’s funds have a minimum initial investment of just $100. The bad news: Unlike the other foreign stock funds listed here, Schwab’s international index fund focuses solely on developed foreign markets. Those who want exposure to emerging markets might take a fifth of the money allocated to the international fund—equal to 4 percent of the entire portfolio—and invest it in an emerging markets stock index fund. One option: Schwab has an ETF that focuses on emerging markets.
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Jonathan Clements (How to Think About Money)
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Percentage of Actively Managed Mutual Funds Outperformed by the S&P 500 Index (Periods through June 30, 2012) Sources: Lipper and The Vanguard Group.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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Average Annual Returns of Actively Managed Mutual Funds Compared with S&P 500 20 years, Ending June 30, 2012 Sources: Lipper, Wilshire, and The Vanguard Group. S&P 500 Index Fund 8.34% Average Active Equity Mutual Funda 7.00% Shortfall +1.34%
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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Q. Some of the index fund providers today are charging operating expenses considerably higher than, say, Vanguard ever has. In fact, some are charging more than even active funds! Is there a limit to what one should ever pay for an index product? What should that limit be? A. I would draw the line at 0.20 percent in yearly operating expenses for a broad-market index fund. There's not much reason to pay more than that, and some broad-market index funds charge a lot more. A firm like Morgan Stanley, for example, charges what the traffic will bear, getting away with murder, and their investors are losing greatly in the process. [Author's note: The Morgan Stanley S&P 500 Index fund, A class (SPIAX), charges a front load (commission) of 5.25 percent, a net expense ratio of 0.64 percent, and a 12b-1 fee (ongoing marketing fee) of 0.24 percent.] It's absurd. The whole success of indexing depends on low cost. And there's no reason to charge a lot of money for an index fund, as the fund requires no management. In the case of international developed-world funds, I'd draw the line at 0.30 percent. And in the case of emerging markets, I wouldn't pay more than 0.40 percent. That's not to say that costs should be your only consideration in choosing an index fund — you also want a fund issued by a solid company with good people at the helm — but costs should always be paramount.
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Russell Wild (Index Investing For Dummies)
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For a simple, hands-free investment experience, invest in lifecycle mutual funds. Choose a low-cost, target-date fund like Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 Fund. Avoid actively managed mutual funds; these funds rarely beat the market. Not only that, but high fees will eat into your investment returns over a long period of time. You are better off choosing a low-cost index fund as described above.
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C.J. Carlsen (Everything You Need to Know About Personal Finance in 1000 Words)
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But she never quite saw the fighting for votes and the fighting for sales in the same way. Perhaps that was because it cut them down to size, she thought. It was easy when there were a dozen or so together at a Branch meeting to rebuild the world, march at the vanguard of socialism and talk of the inevitability of history. But afterwards she’d go out into the streets with an armful of Daily Worker’s, often waiting an hour, two hours, to sell a copy. Sometimes she’d cheat, as the others cheated, and pay for a dozen herself just to get out of it and go home. At the next meeting they’d boast about it—forgetting they’d bought them themselves—”Comrade Gold sold eighteen copies on Saturday night—eighteen!” It would go in the Minutes then, and the Branch bulletin as well. District would rub their hands, and perhaps she’d get a mention in that little panel on the front page about the Fighting Fund. It was such a little world, and she wished they could be more honest. But she lied to herself about it all, too. Perhaps they all did. Or perhaps the others understood more why you had to lie so much.
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John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3))
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Grateful for the business, the dealer gave Bogle a copy of the original book, Naval Battles of Great Britain 1775–1815, from which the naval prints had been lifted. Leafing through it, Bogle came across something Admiral Nelson had written after the Battle of the Nile in 1798: “Nothing could withstand the squadron under my command. The judgment of the captains, together with the valor and high state of discipline of the officers and men of every description, was irresistible.”1 This resonated immediately with Bogle, who then spied below Nelson’s signature, “HMS Vanguard, off the mouth of the Nile.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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To Bogle—who had years earlier battled with Samuelson’s textbook at Princeton—the column was electrifying. It inspired his future mantra that “strategy follows structure,” and this was a strategy that arguably suited Vanguard’s hamstrung structure perfectly. The few existing index funds were almost solely the preserve of pension funds, and while they were beginning to gain traction, none of Vanguard’s competitors in the mutual fund industry—mostly aimed at ordinary investors—would want to start a low-cost product that might show up its pricier, traditional actively managed funds. Meanwhile, Vanguard’s at-cost structure was the perfect match. Plus, he obviously knew a few gunslingers in Boston whom he wouldn’t mind humbling.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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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.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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Initially, he was entranced by the professional investing industry that was blossoming as he entered adulthood. At the time of writing the Financial Analysts Journal article, Bogle was a young hotshot executive of Wellington, one of the oldest and largest mutual fund managers in America. But an odd combination of disaster and serendipity in the mid-1970s set him on the path to upending the industry he once venerated. “There’s nobody more religious than a convert,” observes Jim Riepe, one of Bogle’s closest colleagues in the founding of Vanguard, as a way of explaining the remarkable metamorphosis.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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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.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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This may seem shrill, but in the United States, the birthplace of index investing, the trend is now stark, entrenched, and accelerating. Over the past decade, about 80 cents of every dollar that has gone into the US investment industry has ended up at Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. As a result, the combined stake in S&P 500 companies held by the Big Three has quadrupled over the past two decades, from about 5 percent in in 1998 to north of 20 percent today.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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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.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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Here are some ETFs that track this segment of the market: Name Country Ticker Vanguard Total Corporate Bond USA VTC iShares Canadian Corporate Bond Canada XCB Full disclosure: The fund I owned was XCB.
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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Hear David Swensen, widely respected chief investment officer of the Yale University Endowment Fund. “A minuscule 4 percent of funds produce market-beating after-tax results with a scant 0.6 percent (annual) margin of gain. The 96 percent of funds that fail to meet or beat the Vanguard 500 Index Fund lose by a wealth-destroying margin of 4.8 percent per annum.
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John C. Bogle (The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits 21))
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Mortgage securities. Pooled together from thousands of mortgages around the United States, these bonds are issued by agencies like the Federal National Mortgage Association (“Fannie Mae”) or the Government National Mortgage Association (“Ginnie Mae”). However, they are not backed by the U.S. Treasury, so they sell at higher yields to reflect their greater risk. Mortgage bonds generally underperform when interest rates fall and bomb when rates rise. (Over the long run, those swings tend to even out and the higher average yields pay off.) Good mortgage-bond funds are available from Vanguard, Fidelity, and Pimco. But if a broker ever tries to sell you an individual mortgage bond or “CMO,” tell him you are late for an appointment with your proctologist.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Owning the U.S. “market” means the whole shooting match—the Wilshire 5000. The granddaddy of all “total-market” funds is the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund. With rock-bottom expenses of 0.20%, it is a superb choice. Since its inception in 1992, it has done an excellent job of tracking the Wilshire 5000,
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William J. Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio)
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In addition to lower expense ratios on ETFs, Vanguard charges purchase and redemption fees on several open-end funds. There are no extra fees on Vanguard ETFs although there is a brokerage commission cost to buy and sell shares.
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Richard Ferri (All About Index Funds)
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The Vanguard Total International Stock exchange-traded fund—to cite one low-cost example—owns more than 5,000 non-U.S. stocks, has a dividend yield of 3.2% and charges an annual fee of 0.14%. Another
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Anonymous
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If your 401(k) is lucky enough to have Vanguard funds, look for, respectively, the (U.S.) Total Stock Market Index Fund, Total International Stock Index Fund, and either the Short-Term Bond Index or Total Bond Market Index Fund. As already mentioned, the Fidelity Spartan series is also excellent: the Total Market Index, International Index, and U.S. Bond Index (or Short-Term Treasury Bond Index) funds.
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Anonymous
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fund offered by Vanguard. So if you can implement your investment with low-cost, passively managed indexed funds, you’re going to be a winner.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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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.
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Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
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For most investors, bond funds beat individual bonds hands down (the main exceptions are Treasury securities and some municipal bonds). Major firms like Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, and T. Rowe Price offer a broad menu of bond funds at low cost.9
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Good mortgage-bond funds are available from Vanguard, Fidelity, and Pimco. But if a broker ever tries to sell you an individual mortgage bond or “CMO,” tell him you are late for an appointment with your proctologist.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Its rock-bottom overhead—operating expenses of 0.2% annually, and yearly trading costs of just 0.1%—give the index fund an insurmountable advantage. If stocks generate, say, a 7% annualized return over the next 20 years, a low-cost index fund like Vanguard Total Stock Market will return just under 6.7%. (That would turn a $10,000 investment into more than $36,000.) But the average stock fund, with its 1.5% in operating expenses and roughly 2% in trading costs, will be lucky to gain 3.5% annually. (That would turn $10,000 into just under $20,000—or nearly 50% less than the result from the index fund.)
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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It’s expensive to trade small lots of convertible bonds, and diversification is impractical unless you have well over $100,000 to invest in this sector alone. Fortunately, today’s intelligent investor has the convenient recourse of buying a low-cost convertible bond fund. Fidelity and Vanguard offer mutual funds with annual expenses comfortably under 1%, while several closed-end funds are also available at a reasonable cost (and, occasionally, at discounts to net asset value).4
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Solid global real estate ETFs include: • Vanguard Global ex-US Real Estate ETF (VNQI) • WisdomTree Global ex-US Real Estate Fund (DRW) • iShares International Developed Real Estate ETF (IFGL)
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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When cash moves in and out of money market funds (MMF), it affects Repo rates. Yes, these funds invest a majority of their funds in bank CDs, commercial paper, U.S. Treasurys, corporate bonds, and discount notes, but their uninvested cash goes directly into the Repo market. Large funds like Fidelity, Vanguard, Federated, PIMCO, and Blackrock invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the Repo market each day. When individual inventors put money in these funds, a percentage of that cash filters into the Repo market.
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Scott E.D. Skyrm (The Repo Market, Shorts, Shortages, and Squeezes)
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An Investor in Early Retirement Diversified domestic stocks 30% Diversified international stocks 10% Intermediate-term bonds 30% Inflation-Protected Securities 30% An Investor in Early Retirement Using Vanguard Funds Total Stock Market Index Fund 30% Total International Index Fund 10% Total Bond Market Index Fund 30% Inflation-Protected Securities 30%
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Mel Lindauer (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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Vanguard Total Stock Market Index.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to the Three-Fund Portfolio: How a Simple Portfolio of Three Total Market Index Funds Outperforms Most Investors with Less Risk)
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Well-constructed academic studies confirm the theoretical premise. Robert Arnott’s 2000 examination of U.S. equity mutual-fund returns shows a twenty-year pre-tax deficit of 2.1 percent per year relative to the result achieved by investors in Vanguard’s 500 Index Fund. Nearly 80 percent of actively managed funds failed to reach Vanguard’s market-mimicking return.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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In spite of its limitations as a tax-efficient investing vehicle, on an after-tax basis over the two decades of the Arnott study, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund bests the average mutual fund by 2.8 percent per year. Only 14 percent of funds, as shown in Table 7.6, post superior after-tax results, winning by an average margin of only 1.3 percent per year. Losers, much larger in number than winners, lose by a greater margin, posting a 3.2 percent per annum after-tax deficit.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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Fortunately for investors, two substantial funds management organizations adhere to high fiduciary standards, adopted in the context of corporate cultures designed to serve investor interests. Vanguard and TIAA-CREF both operate on a not-for-profit basis, allowing the companies to make individual investor interests paramount in the funds management process. By emphasizing high-quality delivery of low-cost investment products, Vanguard and TIAA-CREF provide individual investors with valuable tools for the portfolio construction process. Ultimately, a passive index fund managed by a not-for-profit investment management organization represents the combination most likely to satisfy investor aspirations. Following Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum—“less is more”—the rigid calculus of index-fund investing dominates the ornate complexity of active fund management. Pursuing investment with a firm devoted solely to satisfying investor interests unifies principal and agent, reducing the investment equation to its most basic form. Out of the enormous breadth and complexity of the mutual-fund world, the preferred solution for investors stands alone in stark simplicity.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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REITs. Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs (pronounced “reets”), are companies that own and collect rent from commercial and residential properties.10 Bundled into real-estate mutual funds, REITs do a decent job of combating inflation. The best choice is Vanguard REIT Index Fund; other relatively low-cost choices include Cohen & Steers Realty Shares, Columbia Real Estate Equity Fund, and Fidelity Real Estate Investment Fund.11 While a REIT fund is unlikely to be a foolproof inflation-fighter, in the long run it should give you some defense against the erosion of purchasing power without hampering your overall returns. TIPS. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS, are U.S. government bonds, first issued in 1997, that automatically go up in value when inflation rises. Because the full faith and credit of the United States
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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So in my total portfolio, including both my personal and retirement accounts, about 60% of my assets are in stocks, mostly in Vanguard’s stock index funds.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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Most investors are probably better off starting with the SPY, since you can invest as little as a few hundred dollars. Currently, to invest in the Vanguard 500 mutual fund, you will need to have at least $3,000.
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Matthew R. Kratter (A Beginner's Guide to the Stock Market)
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Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs (pronounced “reets”), are companies that own and collect rent from commercial and residential properties.10 Bundled into real-estate mutual funds, REITs do a decent job of combating inflation. The best choice is Vanguard REIT Index Fund; other relatively low-cost choices include Cohen & Steers Realty Shares, Columbia Real Estate Equity Fund, and Fidelity Real Estate Investment Fund.11 While a REIT fund is unlikely to be a foolproof inflation-fighter, in the long run it should give you some defense against the erosion of purchasing power without hampering your overall returns.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Examples of real estate mutual funds include: • Fidelity Real Estate Investment Portfolio (FRESX), a managed fund (so expect a higher expense ratio) that selects REITs with high-quality properties (mainly commercial and industrial) • Cohen & Steers Realty Shares (CSRSX), a managed fund that holds a targeted portfolio of forty to sixty commercial REITs • Vanguard Real Estate Index Fund Admiral Shares (VGSLX), a low-cost index fund that tracks a key REIT benchmark index (called the MSCI US Investable Market Real Estate 25/50 Index) • Cohen & Steers Quality Income Realty Fund (RQI), a closed-end fund that holds a variety of high-income-producing commercial REITs and real estate–related stocks
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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REIT ETFs can cover a broad market (like all equity REITs) or a narrow slice (like hotel REITs). Examples of real estate ETFs include: • Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ), which follows the MSCI US Investable Market Real Estate 25/50 Index (a broad REIT index) • iShares Global REIT (REET), which tracks the FTSE EPRA/NAREIT Global REIT Index and holds a combination of US and overseas property REITs • Pacer Benchmark Industrial Real Estate Sector ETF (INDS), a targeted fund that follows the Benchmark Industrial Real Estate SCTR Index with an emphasis on industrial (such as cell towers and data centers) and self-storage properties • Schwab US REIT ETF (SCHH), which tracks the Dow Jones US Select REIT Index, holding a broad mix of residential and commercial REITs
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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One of the primary concepts that Bogle would promulgate and champion throughout much of his career was that “strategy follows structure.
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Lewis Braham (The House that Bogle Built: How John Bogle and Vanguard Reinvented the Mutual Fund Industry)
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While Immelt said that he encouraged debate, meetings often lacked rigorous questioning. One executive recalled being in a board meeting in which Keith Sherin was presenting the quarterly financial results to the group. The Power business had missed badly, but little specific detail was provided on what went wrong. This executive braced for the reaction from the directors, but it never came—none of them asked what went wrong. When Flannery committed to renewing and shrinking the board of directors, it included half a dozen current or former CEOs, the former head of mutual fund giant Vanguard Group, the dean of New York University’s business school, as well as a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The seventeen independent directors got a mix of cash, stock, and other perks worth more than $300,000 a year. The terms had been even more generous when GE still made appliances; the company allowed directors to take home up to $30,000 worth of GE products in any three-year period. The company matched the directors’ gifts to charity, and upon leaving the board, a director could send $1 million in GE money to a charity. Some directors admitted to having been sold by Immelt’s sweeping optimism, even if they knew he wasn’t the best deal-maker. But they knew he had a hard job, was playing with a tough hand, and had survived multiple major crises. Plus, they liked him. Immelt said that he did his best to keep directors informed, noting that he required them to make trips to GE divisions on their own, but he also knew that the complexity of the business limited their input. As they’d done under Welch, the board usually tended to approve his recommendations and follow his lead. Some felt that Immelt manipulated the board, and it was whispered that members were chosen and educated to see the company through his visionary eyes. There was concern that the board didn’t entirely understand how GE worked, and that Immelt was just fine with that. Like many CEOs who are also their company’s chairman, he made sure that his board was aligned with him.
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Thomas Gryta (Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric)
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Are there any exceptions to the rule? Only two that experts tell me are worth considering in so far as one needs the tax efficiency. Vanguard and TIAA-CREF both offer extremely low-cost variable annuities with a list of low-cost index funds to choose from. They do not charge commissions, so there are no surrender charges if you want to cash in.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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Vanguard’s Dividend Growth (VDIGX) or Equity Income (VEIPX) funds
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Steven G. Vernon (Money for Life: Turn Your IRA and 401(k) Into a Lifetime Retirement Paycheck)
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Vanguard’s Wellesley Income (VWINX), Wellington (VWELX), Balanced Index (VBIAX), or Target Retirement Income (VTINX) funds
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Steven G. Vernon (Money for Life: Turn Your IRA and 401(k) Into a Lifetime Retirement Paycheck)
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My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: put 10 percent of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90 percent in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.)”4
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Andrew Hallam (Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School)
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Fifteen-year results show a scant 5 percent probability of picking a winner, making active manager selection akin to backing a long shot at the race track. In a cruel twist of fate, for those skilled (or lucky) enough to identify a mutual-fund winner, the gain proves far more mediocre than the race track’s long-shot payoff, as the average winnings amount to a scant 1.1 percent per year. Fully 95 percent of active investors lose to the passive alternative, dropping 3.8 percent per annum to the Vanguard 500 Index Fund results.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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They shut the door. The best funds often close to new investors—permitting only their existing shareholders to buy more. That stops the feeding frenzy of new buyers who want to pile in at the top and protects the fund from the pains of asset elephantiasis. It’s also a signal that the fund managers are not putting their own wallets ahead of yours. But the closing should occur before—not after—the fund explodes in size. Some companies with an exemplary record of shutting their own gates are Longleaf, Numeric, Oakmark, T. Rowe Price, Vanguard, and Wasatch. They don’t advertise. Just as Plato says in The Republic that the ideal rulers are those who do not want to govern, the best fund managers often behave as if they don’t want your money. They don’t appear constantly on financial television or run ads boasting of their No. 1 returns.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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REITs do a decent job of combating inflation. The best choice is Vanguard REIT Index Fund; other relatively low-cost choices include Cohen & Steers Realty Shares, Columbia Real Estate Equity Fund, and Fidelity Real Estate Investment Fund.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)