Wigglesworth Quotes

Great faith is the product of great fights. Great testimonies are the outcome of great tests. Great triumphs can only come out of great trials.

In me is working a power stronger than every other power. The life that is in me is a thousand times bigger than I am outside.

The secret of spiritual success is a hunger that persists…It is an awful condition to be satisfied with one’s spiritual attainments…God was and is looking for hungry, thirsty people.

It is better to live ready than to get ready!

There is nothing impossible with God. All the impossibility is with us when we measure God by the limitations of our unbelief.

God has privileged us in Christ Jesus to live above the ordinary human plane of life. Those who want to be ordinary and live on a lower plane can do so, but as for me, I will not.

The Lord would so cleanse the motive and desires of our hearts that we will seek but one thing only, and that is, His glory.

There is nothing that our God cannot do. He will do everything if you will dare to believe.

The Spirit reveals, unfolds, takes of the things of Christ and shows them to us, and prepares us to be more than a match for Satanic forces.

God wants to purify our minds until we can bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things. God dwells in you, but you cannot have this divine power until you live and walk in the Holy Ghost, until the power of the new life is greater than the old life.

The blood of Jesus Christ and His mighty name are an antidote to all the subtle seeds of unbelief that Satan would sow in your minds.

The Bible is the Word of God: supernatural in origin, eternal in duration, inexpressible in valor, infinite in scope, regenerative in power, infallible in authority, universal in interest, personal in application, inspired in totality. Read it through, write it down, pray it in, work it out, and then pass it on. Truly it is the Word of God. It brings into man the personality of God; it changes the man until he becomes the epistle of God. It transforms his mind, changes his character, takes him on from grace to grace, and gives him an inheritance in the Spirit. God comes in, dwells in, walks in, talks through, and sups with him.

Wherever the Holy Ghost has right of way, the gifts of the Spirit will be in manifestation; and where these gifts are never in manifestation, I question whether He is present.

Those who carry the vessels of the Lord must be clean, must be holy (Isa. 52:11).

It pays to trust God with all and to make no reservation.

I am not moved by what I see. I am moved only by what I believe. I know this-no man looks at appearances if he believes. No man considers how he feels if he believes. The man who believes God has it.

These times of waiting on God for the fullness of the Spirit are times when He searches the heart and tests the mind (Jer. 17:10).

When the Word and Spirit come together, there will be the biggest movement of the Holy Spirit that the nation, and indeed the world, has ever seen.1 —SMITH WIGGLESWORTH (1859–1947)

Smith Wigglesworth exhorted, “Read it through; write it down; pray it in; work it out; pass it on. The Word of God changes a man until he becomes an Epistle of God.

I will tell you, for I never saw a man get anything from God who prayed on the earth. If you get anything from God, you will have to pray into heaven; for it is all there. If you are living in the earth realm and expect things from heaven, they will never come. And as I saw, in the presence of God, the limitations of my faith,

wrought. Jesus saw every touch by God as a miracle,

Real faith built the ark, but real faith did not shut the door. God did that. He does what you cannot do.

Real faith has perfect peace and joy and a shout at any time. It always sees the victory.

One half of the trouble in the assemblies is the people’s murmuring over the conditions they are in. The Bible teaches us not to murmur. If you reach that standard, you will never murmur anymore. You will be above murmuring. You will be in the place where God is absolutely the exchanger of thought, the exchanger of actions, and the exchanger of your inward purity. He will be purifying you all the time and lifting you higher, and you will know you are not of this world (John 15:19).

The Holy Spirit is coming to take out of the world a church that is a perfect bride. He must find in us perfect yieldedness, with every desire subjected to Him.

There is no such thing as the Lord not meeting your need. There are no “if’s” or “mar’s” ; His promises are all “shah’s.” All things are possible to him that believeth. Oh, the name of Jesus! There is power in that name to meet every condition of human need.

I believe that there is only one way to all the treasures of God, and that is the way of faith. By faith and faith alone do we enter into a knowledge of the attributes and become partakers of the beatitudes, and participate in the glories of our ascended Lord. All His promises are Yea and Amen to them that believe.

Thought for today: When the Holy Spirit comes into your body, He comes to unveil the King, to assure you of His presence.

Divine life is full of divine appointment and equipping, and you cannot be filled with the power of God without a manifestation. It is my prayer that we would understand that to be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be filled with manifestation, the glory of the Lord being in the midst of us, manifesting His divine power.

Thought for today: We are saved, called with a holy calling-called to be saints, holy, pure, Godlike, sons with power.

Les grandes âmes apprécient la valeur des autres. Les grands cœurs émettent des jugements positifs. Ils illuminent et enrichissent la vie de ceux qui les entourent ; ils font jaillir des autres le meilleur, grâce aux rayons de soleil de leur appréciation.

Six people went into the house of a sick man to pray for him. He was an Episcopalian vicar, and lay in his bed utterly helpless, without even strength to help himself. He had read a little tract about healing and had heard about people praying for the sick, and sent for these friends, who, he thought, could pray the prayer of faith. He was anointed according to James 5:14, but, because he had no immediate manifestation of healing, he wept bitterly. The six people walked out of the room, somewhat crestfallen to see the man lying there in an unchanged condition. When they were outside, one of the six said, “There is one thing we might have done. I wish you would all go back with me and try it.” They went back and all got together in a group. This brother said, “Let us whisper the name of Jesus.” At first when they whispered this worthy name nothing seemed to happen. But as they continued to whisper, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” the power began to fall. As they saw that God was beginning to work, their faith and joy increased; and they whispered the name louder and louder. As they did so the man arose from his bed and dressed himself. The secret was just thus, those six people had gotten their eyes off the sick man, and they were just taken up with the Lord Jesus Himself, and their faith grasped the power that there is in His name. O, if people would only appreciate the power that there is in this name, there is no telling what would happen.

crumbs.” Jesus was stirred as He saw the faith of this woman, and He told her, “For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter.” Today there are many children of God refusing their blood-purchased portion of health in Christ and are throwing it away, while sinners are pressing through and picking it up frown under the table, as it were, and are finding the cure not only for their bodies, but for their spirits and souls as well. The Syrophenician woman went home and found that the devil had indeed gone out of her daughter. Today there is bread, there is life, there is health for every child of

Never look back if you want the power o f God in your life. You will find out that in the measure you have allowed yourself to look back you have missed that which God has for you.

During the next hour she vomited out thirty-seven evil spirits and she named every one of them as they came out.

There is no limit to what our limitless God will do in response to a limitless faith.

I refuse to be an ordinary man. You say, “Why do you?” Because I have an extraordinary God who makes extraordinary people.

When the Holy Spirit comes, He will reveal things to you. Has He revealed them yet? He is going to do it. Just expect Him to do so. The best thing for you is to expect Him to do it now.

The Lord was looking for fruit on the tree. He found “nothing but leaves.” There are thousands of people like that. They dress up like Christians, but it is all leaves. “Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit …” (John 15:8). He has no way in which to get fruit, only through us. We have not to be ordinary people. To be saved is to be an extraordinary man, an exposition of God. When Jesus was talking about the new life He said, “…Except a man be born again [of God], he cannot see the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is

You are in the right position when you allow the glory of the new life to cause you to act. Live in the Acts of the Apostles, and every day you will see some miracle worked by the power of the living God.

has done it,” he said. They rolled back the bed clothes and the doctors examined him, and the abscesses were cut clear away. The nurse cleaned the place where they had been. The doctors could see the bowels still open and they said to the wife, “We know that you have great faith, and we can see that a miracle has taken place. But you must let us unite these broken parts and put in silver tubes, and we know that

THERE HAS BEEN A SILENT DIVORCE IN THE CHURCH, SPEAKING generally, between the Word and the Spirit. When there is a divorce, sometimes the children stay with the mother, sometimes with the father. In this divorce you have those on the Word side and those on the Spirit side. What is the difference? Those on the Word side stress earnestly contending for the faith once delivered to the saints, expository preaching, sound theology, rediscovering the doctrines of the Reformation—justification by faith, sovereignty of God. Until we get back to the Word, the honor of God’s name will not be restored. What is wrong with this emphasis? Nothing. It is exactly right, in my opinion. Those on the Spirit side stress getting back to the Book of Acts, signs, wonders, and miracles, gifts of the Holy Spirit—with places being shaken at prayer meetings, get in Peter’s shadow and you are healed, lie to the Holy Spirit and you are struck dead. Until we recover the power of the Spirit, the honor of God’s name will not be restored. What is wrong with this emphasis? Nothing. It is exactly right, in my opinion. The problem is, neither will learn from the other. But if these two would come together, the simultaneous combination would mean spontaneous combustion. And if Smith Wigglesworth’s prophecy got it right, the world will be turned upside down again.

You have promised it, Lord. Now do it.” God rejoices when we manifest a faith that holds Him to His word.

Blessed is the man who will swear to his own hurt and change not; who keeps the vow he has made to God; who is willing to lay his all at God's feet.

The best long-term results come from buying a big, well-diversified portfolio of financial securities, and trading as little as possible.

God says it; I believe it; and that settles it!” He

God longs intensely for unhindered communication and total response between Him and the believer indwelt by the Spirit. This

It follows inevitably that if you believe God as a Person, you will believe every word that He speaks.

God has no use for any man who is not hungering and thirsting for yet more of Himself and His righteousness.

It is not the possession of extraordinary gifts that makes extraordinary usefulness, but the dedication of what we have to God.

Every fresh revelation calls for a new dedication.” He

My heavenly bank, my heavenly bank, The house of God's treasure and store. I have plenty in here; I'm a real millionaire.

I don’t want them to see me anymore— only Jesus!” If

man may be saved and still be carnally minded. When many people hear about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, their carnal minds at once arise against the Holy Spirit.

Beloved, now we are children of God.

There is power to overcome everything in the world through the name of Jesus.

A preacher should not land at a place and say that God had sent him. I am always fearful when I hear a man advertising this. If he is sent of God, the saints will know it.

The purpose of all Scripture is to move us on to this wonderful and blessed elevation of faith where our constant experience is the manifestation of God’s life and power through us.

The power of God is beyond all our conception. The trouble is that we do not have the power of God in a full manifestation because of our finite thoughts, but as we go on and let God have His way, there is no limit to what our limitless God will do in response to a limitless faith. But you will never get anywhere except you are in constant pursuit of all the power of God.

People do not expect to see signs and wonders today as the disciples saw them of old. Has God changed? Or has our faith waned so that we are not expecting the greater works that Jesus promised?

There is something about believing in God, that makes God willing to pass over a million people just to anoint you. I believe God will always turn out to meet you on a special line if you dare to believe Him.

These words were among the greatest that Jesus ever spoke: "The hour has come." Time was finished and eternity had begun for every soul that was covered with the blood. Until that hour, all people lived only to die, but the moment the sacrifice was made, it was not the end but only the beginning. The soul, covered with the blood, has moved from a natural to an eternal union with the Lord. Instead of death will be the fullness of life divine.

Lester Sumrall told a story of a conference he and Smith Wigglesworth were part of. It was the first time Sumrall had met Wigglesworth. Sumrall got up to preach. And he preached and preached. After a while, Wigglesworth came up behind him, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Son, it would have been wise for you to have ended fifteen minutes ago, when the Holy Ghost ended.” And he shut down the meeting. So many people go beyond the Holy Spirit.

October 26 Endure Temptation Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him. -James 1:12 Scripture reading: Psalm 139

I know it was personally right, it was divinely right, for those apostles to hear what Jesus said and to tarry for the Holy Spirit; however, it is not right now to tarry for the Holy Spirit. Then why do we not all receive the Holy Spirit, you ask? Because our bodies are not ready for it; our temples are not cleansed. When our temples are purified and our minds are put in order so that carnalities and fleshly desires and everything contrary to the Spirit have gone, then the Holy Spirit can take full charge. The Holy Spirit is not a manifestation of carnality. There are any number of people who never read the Word of God who could not be led away by the powers of Satan. But the power of the Holy Spirit is most lovely, divine in all its construction. It is a great refiner. It is full of life, but it is always divine—never natural. If you deal in the flesh after you are baptized in the Holy Spirit, you cease to go on. Beloved, I want to speak about something greater; something to lift your minds, elevate your thoughts, and bring you into divine ways; something that elevates you out of yourself and into God, out of the world and into a place where you know you have rest for your feet, where you cease from your own works (Heb. 4:10), and where God works in you mightily “to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). When I think about a river—a pure, holy, divine river—I say, “What can stand against its inrush?” Wherever it is—in a railway coach, in the street, or in a meeting—its power and flow will always be felt; it will always do its work. Jesus spoke about the Holy Spirit that was to be given. I want you to think about how God gave it, how its coming was manifested, and its reception and its outflow after it had come.

So I have an extravagant God with extravagant language to make me an extravagant person-in wisdom. To this end, we pray that God will show us now why we really need the word of wisdom and how we may be in a place in which we will surely know it is of God.

Estos son días cuando necesitamos que nuestra fe sea fortalecida, cuando necesitamos conocer a Dios. Dios ha diseñado que el justo vivirá por fe. Cualquier hombre puede ser cambiado por fe, sin importar cual sea su situación. Yo sé que la Palabra de Dios es suficiente.

There are people who begin waiting on God, and they do not know what they are waiting for—they have no idea. I believe that God is making the thing so that you cannot get out of it. You may refuse it, and you may come within its reach and come outside the boundaries of it, but it is for you. It is a personal baptism—it is not a church baptism. It is for the body of believers who are to be clothed with the power and unction, or anointing, of the Spirit by this glorious waiting. What do I mean by saying it is not a “church” baptism? Why, I mean that people get their minds on a building when I say “church.” You see, it is the believers who compose the “body” —believers in the Lord Jesus Christ—whatever sect or creed or denomination they are. I also tell you that Paul went so far as to say that some people have very strange ideas of who will be ready for the coming of the kingdom. All in Christ will be ready, and you have to decide whether you are in Christ or not. The Scripture says, in the first verse of Romans 8, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.” If you are there—praise the Lord! That is a good position. I ask the Lord that He will bring us all into that place. What a wonder it will be.

Possess patience to such an extent that you can suffer anything for the church, for your friends, for your neighbors, or for anyone. Remember this: we build character in others as our character is built. As we are pure in our thoughts, are tender and gracious to other people, and possess our souls in patience (Luke 21:19), then people have a great desire for our fellowship in the Holy Spirit.

Miss Wigglesworth gave him an assessing look out of her remarkable blue eyes. “You’re a libertine? How very unique.” She gave a small fake yawn. She was, in that heartbeat, so perfect and so pure and so very dangerous indeed that all he could do was frighten her away. “Have you been listening at keyholes, Lazuli? I assure you, they have always been willing, even when I ask that they pretend otherwise.” She blushed deep pink at that – an appealing thing, the blood high under her cheeks, warm and subtle and alive. He wanted to delve into her, with teeth and body until she was ravaged and supine and wrecked and bleeding and his. She did not, as he had expected, break away from him mid-step. The blush was there, to be sure, but she was made of sterner stuff. Any true innocent would be repulsed by the intent in his tone. A woman without experience would fear the implication of his preferences – the certain acknowledgment that there was wolf, nothing but wolf, underneath all his icy indifference. Faith was intrigued. She tilted her head and looked hard at him, her lovely eyes flinty. “So, you’re just a beast who enjoys the chase, nothing else?” “Exactly so.” She threw it all at him. Like a piece of warm fresh meat, cut and dripping temptation, enough to make him salivate, to bait her trap. “You can’t catch me.” The waltz ended.

As a business owner, it's challenging to stand out in the crowd. My philosophy is get out of the massive crown and be a crowd of one. When everyone else zigs, I zag.

I measure my success by tracking the progress of my goals, not be what others around me are doing.

It's really amazing how things will fall into place when you maintain a positive attitude.

Remove the mask you think others want to see. Instead, let them see your true, authentic self.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised (Luke 4:18).

Will you let Him have your will; will you let Him have you? If you will, all His power is at your disposal.

The secret for the future is living and moving in the power of the Holy Ghost.

For in him we live, and move, and have our being… (Acts 17:28).

Not only did this gain Sharpe his PhD, but it eventually evolved into a seminal paper on what he called the “capital asset pricing model” (CAPM), a formula that investors could use to calculate the value of financial securities. The broader, groundbreaking implication of CAPM was introducing the concept of risk-adjusted returns—one had to measure the performance of a stock or a fund manager versus the volatility of its returns—and indicated that the best overall investment for most investors is the entire market, as it reflects the optimal tradeoff between risks and returns.

CHRIST

We are in a bad condition if we have to pray for power when an occasion like this comes along, or if we have to wait until we feel a sense of His presence. The Lord's promise was, "Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you," and if we will BELIEVE, the power of God will be always manifested when there is a definite need. When you exercise your FAITH, you will find that there is the greater power in you than that is in the world. Oh, to be awakened out of UNBELIEF into a place of daring for God on the authority of His blessed Book and the redemptive work of CHRIST!

Faith enables you to lay hold of what is and to get it out of the way for God to bring in something that is not.

If your wife is going to have a baby, you’re going to be better off if you call an obstetrician than if you do it yourself. And if your plumbing pipes are clogged, you’re probably better off calling a plumber. Most professions have value added to them above what the laymen can accomplish themselves. In aggregate, the investment profession does not do that,” Buffett had told attendees. “So you have a huge group of people making—I put the estimate as $140 billion a year—that, in aggregate, are and can only accomplish what somebody can do in ten minutes a year by themselves.

In the conclusion to his letter to the Post’s owner, Buffett therefore laid out his recommendations: Either stay the course with a bunch of big, mainstream professional fund managers and accept that the newspaper’s pension fund would likely do slightly worse than the market; find smaller, specialized investment managers who were more likely to be able to beat the market; or simply build a broad, diversified portfolio of stocks that mirrored the entire market. Buffett obliquely noted that “several funds have been established fairly recently to duplicate the averages, quite explicitly embodying the principle that no management is cheaper, and slightly better than average paid management after transaction costs.

Inspired by Sharpe’s work, Fouse in 1969 recommended that Mellon launch a passive fund that would try to replicate only one of the big stock market indices, like the S&P 500 of America’s biggest companies. It got nixed by Mellon’s management. In the spring of 1970, he then proposed a fund that would systematically invest according to a dividend-based model devised by John Burr Williams—who had nearly two decades earlier inspired Markowitz’s work—but that too was summarily squashed. “Goddammit Fouse, you’re trying to turn my business into a science,” his boss told him.14

The plan was to invest an equal amount of money in each of the fifteen hundred or so stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange, as this was the closest approximation to the entire US equity market. And in July 1971, the first-ever passively managed, index-tracking fund was born, courtesy of an initial $6 million investment from Samsonite’s pension fund.

At Chicago, Booth also got to know another precocious student in the year below him—Rex Sinquefield. Both young students grew close to their professor and absorbed Fama’s acerbic view of fund managers. “I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers. But I don’t want to bad-mouth the astrologers,” the professor once quipped.

Whatever the reason, the existence of some persistent investment factors is today accepted by almost every (if not all) financial economist and investor. In an ingenious bit of marketing, factors are often called “smart beta.” Sharpe himself grew to hate the term, as it implies that all other forms of beta are dumb.10 Most financial academics prefer the term “risk premia,” to more accurately reflect the fact that they think these factors primarily yield an investment premium from taking some kind of risk—even if they cannot always agree what the precise risk is. An important milestone was when Fama and his frequent collaborator Ken French—another Chicago finance professor who would later also join DFA—in 1992 published a paper with the oblique title “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns.”11 It was a bombshell. In what would become known as the three-factor model, Fama and French used data on companies listed on the NYSE, the American Stock Exchange, and the Nasdaq from 1963 to 1990 and showed that both value (the tendency of cheap stocks to outperform expensive ones) and size (the tendency of smaller stocks to outperform bigger ones) were distinct factors from the broader market factor—the beta. Although Fama and French’s paper termed these factors as rewards for taking extra risks, coming from the father of the efficient-markets hypothesis, it was a signal event in the history of financial economics.12 Since then academics have identified a panoply of factors, with varying degrees of durability, strength, and acceptance. Of course, factors do not always work. They can go through long fallow stretches where they underperform the market. Value stocks, for example, suffered a miserable bout of performance in the dotcom bubble, when investors wanted to buy only trendy technology stocks. And to DFA’s chagrin, after small caps enjoyed a robust year in DFA’s first year of existence, they would then undergo a long, painful seven-year period of trailing dramatically behind the S&P 500.13 DFA managed to keep growing, losing very few clients, partly because it had always stressed to them that stretches like this could happen. But it was an uncomfortable period that led to many awkward conversations with clients.

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.

RAND proved formative. Some of its employees joked that it stood for “Research And No Development,” and its intellectualism was inspiring to the young economist. The think tank’s ethos was to work on problems so hard that they might actually be unsolvable.9 Four days of the week were dedicated to RAND projects, but the fifth was free for freewheeling personal research. Ken Arrow, a famous economist, and John Nash, the game theorist immortalized in the film A Beautiful Mind, both consulted for RAND around the time Sharpe was there. The eclecticism of RAND’s research community is reflected in his first published works, which were a proposal for a smog tax and a review of aircraft compartment design criteria for Army deployments.

LEONARD “JIMMIE” SAVAGE, a University of Chicago statistics professor with Coke-bottle glasses and an eclectic, brilliant mind, was rummaging through the university library in 1954 when he made a discovery: a book by a little-known turn-of-the-twentieth-century French mathematician named Louis Bachelier with ideas astonishingly far ahead of their time. Savage sent postcards lauding the work to some of his friends and asked if they had “ever heard of this guy?”1

The three pioneering efforts weren’t perfect index funds, in that they didn’t buy every single stock in the S&P 500. Doing so would be too costly at a time when Wall Street firms still charged fixed commissions, and the tradability of smaller stocks in the blue-chip index was still poor. They were also simply too small to be able to buy all the stocks. To varying degrees, they replicated the benchmark through a process known as sampling—picking a broad but smaller subset of stocks that would best match the overall index.

Of course, as the writer Upton Sinclair once observed, it is difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it. “If people start believing this random-walk garbage and switch to index funds, a lot of $80,000-a-year portfolio managers and analysts will be replaced by $16,000-a-year computer clerks. It just can’t happen,” one anonymous mutual fund manager griped to the Wall Street Journal in 1973.31

By 1977, Institutional Investor declared that “indexing is likely to be an idea whose time will pass.”38 At any rate, there was widespread skepticism that ordinary investors would ever adopt index funds. After all, they were completely unaware of the research being pumped out by academia on the poor average performance of their mutual fund managers, and anyway, who would want to just settle for mediocrity? “It seems unlikely that the public will ever embrace buying the averages in this way, since individuals usually seek dramatic gains, not a market-linked performance many equate with mediocrity,” the industry magazine wrote.39 Fouse later jokingly quoted the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to explain why the general public was slow to cotton on: “Only small secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by the public’s incredulity.

The Greek poet Archilochus once observed that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing—a phrase later made famous by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Bogle was the quintessential hedgehog. He always believed in one big thing with a fiery passion. He had the integrity and intellectual suppleness to shift positions, though. When he was later confronted with his change of heart on the merits of active investing, he quoted the economist John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

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.

Fama proposed that in an efficient market, the competition among so many smart traders, analysts, and investors meant that at any given time, all known, relevant information was already reflected in stock prices. And new information would continually be baked into the price virtually instantaneously.

In the end, the proceeds that actually went to Girls Inc. amounted to $2.2 million, thanks to a timely switch of the bet’s collateral from US Treasury bonds into Berkshire stock—highlighting how human discretion can still play a valuable role. The money helped finance a Girls Inc. program for vulnerable young women at a converted convent on the outskirts of Omaha, now appropriately renamed Protégé House.

However, inspired by the fund, WFIA in November 1973 launched a simpler fund open to all the bank’s institutional clients—seeded with $5 million from Wells Fargo’s own pension fund and an equal amount from Illinois Bell’s retirement system—that would simply seek to mimic the performance of the S&P 500.* At the time, this accounted for about two-thirds of the entire US stock market anyway,20 and the index was “capitalization-weighted”—in other words, the weighting of each company was according to its overall stock market value, and the fund would just have to buy an equal number of shares in each company. By 1976, Samsonite folded the money in its original vehicle into WFIA’s S&P 500 index fund.

Given how investors preferred the use of brand-name indices, and how investor inflows and tradability is a virtuous circle for ETFs, it essentially allowed BGI to seize and fortify important tracts of the investment landscape undisturbed. The iShares Russell ETF alone manages about $70 billion today, more than its three biggest competitors combined. It was in effect what Silicon Valley today terms a “blitzscaling”—a well-funded, rapid, and aggressive move to build an unassailable market share as quickly as possible.