John C. Bogle > Quotes

“Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.” Stick to the good plan. Traditional”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“As I have earlier noted, the most important things in life and in business can’t be measured. The trite bromide 'If you can measure it, you can manage it' has been a hindrance in the building a great real-world organization, just as it has been a hindrance in evaluating the real-world economy. It is character, not numbers, that make the world go ‘round. How can we possibly measure the qualities of human existence that give our lives and careers meaning? How about grace, kindness, and integrity? What value do we put on passion, devotion, and trust? How much do cheerfulness, the lilt of a human voice, and a touch of pride add to our lives? Tell me, please, if you can, how to value friendship, cooperation, dedication, and spirit. Categorically, the firm that ignores the intangible qualities that the human beings who are our colleagues bring to their careers will never build a great workforce or a great organization.”
― John C. Bogle, Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

“On balance, the financial system subracts value from society”
― John C. Bogle, Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

“When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The two greatest enemies of the equity fund investor are expenses and emotions.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“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.”
― John C Bogle

“The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.”
― John C. Bogle, Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor

“Buying funds based purely on their past performance is one of the stupidest things an investor can do.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“Owning the stock market over the long term is a winner's game, but attempting to beat the market is a loser's game.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The true investor . . . will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The most important of these rules is the first one: the eternal law of reversion to the mean (RTM) in the financial markets.”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“For finally, “you can always count on Americans to do the right thing,” as Churchill pointed out, “but only after they’ve tried everything else.”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“In the mutual fund industry, for example, the annual rate of portfolio turnover for the average actively managed equity fund runs to almost 100 percent, ranging from a hardly minimal 25 percent for the lowest turnover quintile to an astonishing 230 percent for the highest quintile. (The turnover of all-stock-market index funds is about 7 percent.)”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“In 1980, the compensation of the average chief executive officer was forty-two times that of the average worker; by the year 2004, the ratio had soared to 280 times that of the average worker (down from an astonishing 531 times at the peak in 2000). Over the past quarter-century, CEO compensation measured in current dollars rose nearly sixteen times over , while the compensation of the average worker slightly more than doubled. Measured in real(1980) dollars, however, the compensation of the average worker rose just 0.3 percent per year, barely enough to maintain his or her standard of living. Yet CEO compensation rose at a rate of 8.5 percent annually, increasing by more than seven times in real terms during the period. The rationale was that these executives had "created wealth" for their shareholders. But were CEOs actually creating value commensurate with this huge increase in compenstion? Certainly the average CEO was not. In real terms, aggregate corporate profits grew at an annual rate of just 2.9 percent, compared to 3.1 percent for our nation's economy, as represented by the Gross Domestic Product. How that somewhat dispiriting lag can drive average CEO compensation to a cool 9.8 million in 2004 is one of the great anomalies of the age.”
― John Bogle

“Investors need to understand not only the magic of compounding long-term returns, but the tyranny of compounding costs; costs that ultimately overwhelm that magic.”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“The index fund is a most unlikely hero for the typical investor. It is no more (nor less) than a broadly diversified portfolio, typically run at rock-bottom costs, without the putative benefit of a brilliant, resourceful, and highly skilled portfolio manager. The index fund simply buys and holds the securities in a particular index, in proportion to their weight in the index. The concept is simplicity writ large.”
― John C. Bogle, Common Sense on Mutual Funds, Updated 10th Anniversary Edition

“Gunning for average is your best shot at finishing above average.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, written 70 years ago: “It is dangerous . . . to apply to the future inductive arguments based on past experience, unless one can distinguish the broad reasons why past experience was what it was.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“Today, in our society, in economics, and in finance, we place far too much trust in numbers. Numbers are not reality . At best, they are a pale reflection of reality. At worst, they’re a gross distortion of the truths we seek to measure. But the damage doesn’t stop there. Not only do we rely too heavily on historic economic and market data; our optimistic bias also leads us to misinterpret the data and give them credence that they rarely merit. By worshipping at the altar of numbers and by discounting the immeasurable, we have in effect created a numeric economy that can easily undermine the real one. Government:”
― John C. Bogle, Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

“For example, trading in S&P 500-linked futures totaled more than $60 trillion(!) in 2011, five times the S&P 500 Index total market capitalization of $12.5 trillion. We also have credit default swaps, which are essentially bets on whether a corporation can meet the interest payments on its bonds. These credit default swaps alone had a notional value of $33 trillion. Add to this total a slew of other derivatives, whose notional value as 2012 began totaled a cool $708 trillion. By contrast, for what it’s worth, the aggregate capitalization of the world’s stock and bond markets is about $150 trillion, less than one-fourth as much. Is this a great financial system . . . or what!”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“It’s amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he’s paid a small fortune not to understand it.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“some estimates suggest that the failure rate is around 20 percent, meaning that each year, one of every five hedge funds goes up in smoke.”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“Pressed to identify useful financial innovations created during the past quarter-century, Paul A. Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chairman and recent chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Board, could single out only one: “The ATM.”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“In 1950, individual investors held 92 percent of U.S. stocks and institutional investors held 8 percent. The roles have flipped, with institutions, now holding 70 percent, predominating, and individuals, now holding 30 percent, playing a secondary role. Simply put, these institutional agents now collectively hold firm voting control over Corporate America. (I”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“The simple fact is that selecting a mutual fund that will outpace the stock market over the long term is, using Cervantes’ wonderful observation, like “looking for a needle in the haystack.” So I offer you Bogle’s corollary: “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“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.”
― John C. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation

“Three, no matter what career you choose, do your best to hold high its traditional professional values, now swiftly eroding, in which serving the client is always the highest priority. And don’t ignore the greater good of your community, your nation, and your world. As William Penn pointed out, “We pass through this world but once, so do now any good you can do, and show now any kindness you can show, for we shall not pass this way again.”   As”
― John C. Bogle, Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life