Top 173 Quotes & Sayings by John C. Bogle
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman John C. Bogle.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
The rewards of my life have been great. I built a company; I left things better than I found them. I have a good reputation. I put the Vanguard shareholders and crew first. That's a huge thing.
There is almost no limit to the ability of investors to ignore the lessons of the past.
There's no such thing as wealth without risk.
I would always advise young people to follow their star - not my star. They have to live their own life. If they decide they want to go into the investment business, do it, but make it a better business than it is today.
The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.
The market is often stupid, but you can't focus on that. Focus on the underlying value of dividends and earnings.
I think average investors should not trade a lot. The evidence is overpowering. The more you trade, the less you earn.
I've usually used the phrase 'stay the course' as one of the great rules of investment success.
We do some things for family reasons. If it's not consistent, well, life isn't always consistent.
I built a career out of knowing what I don't know.
Our financial system is driven by a giant marketing machine in which the interests of sellers directly conflict with the interests of buyers.
Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.
If you were to just design the perfect retirement plan, you would own the stock market or you would own the bond market. You would get all the costs or all that you possibly could out of the system. So on an annual basis, if the market went up 8 percent, you would get 7.8 or 7.9 percent.
What we need is congressional action to establish a federal principle of fiduciary duty - encapsulated by the phrase 'no man can serve two masters.'
I had done some work on index funds in my senior thesis at Princeton in 1951.
When a door closes, if you look long enough and hard enough, if you're strong enough, you'll find a window that opens.
Working for company X and having a substantial portion of your retirement plan in company X is simply exposing yourself to too much risk, because the company is both your employer and the source of your retirement income. So if something goes wrong, you lose both your job and your retirement plan.
I spend about half of my time wondering why I have so much in stocks and about half wondering why I have so little.
I've been studying mutual funds since 1949, when I began researching my senior thesis at Princeton University.
Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that's essentially the idea behind the index fund.
When you're young, you've got plenty of time to recover from your mistakes.
My incentive in starting Vanguard, I'm very blunt about this, it was my means of preserving my career. That's a very selfish thing.
Central to the effective functioning of early capitalism was the fundamental principle of trusting and being trusted.
My father's money vanished in the Great Depression, and he had trouble keeping a job.
As I have said before, the daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.
They were tough times and I started working when I was 10 years old, delivering papers and eventually becoming a waiter.
Mutual funds with superior performance records often falter.
Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one's early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.
We have moved from treating funds as investment trusts designed to serve their owner-beneficiaries to treating funds as consumer products, designed to attract the largest possible assets. This new approach has ill-served the interests of fund shareholders.
The malfeasance and misjudgments by our corporate, financial and government leaders, declining ethical standards, and the failure of our new agency society reflect a failure of capitalism.
I was never the type who had a particular ambition. I had friends in college who would say, 'I want to be a vice president by the time I'm 35 years old.' A lot of people had these career plans. I didn't have any. I thought if I did my best, good things would happen.
There no longer can be any doubt that the creation of the first index mutual fund was the most successful innovation - especially for investors - in modern financial history.
I tend to give to those who have helped me along the road of life: Blair Academy, Princeton University, our church, and several hospitals that got me here in one piece. On the community side, I've always been a big supporter of the United Way.
Regardless of what happens in the markets, stick to your investment program. Changing your strategy at the wrong time can be the single most devastating mistake you can make as an investor.
The driving force of any profession includes not only the special knowledge, skills and standards that it demands, but the duty to serve responsibly, selflessly and wisely, and to establish an inherently ethical relationship between professionals and society.
My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn't have a sou.
Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It is a high-risk, high-reward proposition.
I learned you work for what you get, and I feel sorry for people who haven't had that upbringing.
The basic idea of retirement income is, to me, to get a check, two checks every month, one from your fixed income and one from equity account. And you want them to grow over time.
Never underrate the importance of asset allocation.
Diversification has been, and balance, like Wellington, has been so drummed into me, it's part of my personality.
We must work to establish a 'fiduciary society,' where manager/agents entrusted with managing other people's money are required - by federal statute - to place front and center the interests of the owners they are duty-bound to serve.
Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.
In investing, you get what you don't pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won't be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.
The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.
If the job of capitalism is to create wealth for those who put up the capital, no fund group comes close to Vanguard's success in serving its owners. So we're probably as far away from communism as is realistically possible.
The long-term focus of index funds is a much needed counterweight to the short-termism favored by so many market participants.
I don't like going into stores, I don't like the whole process of buying things.
Net return is simply the gross return of your investment portfolio less the costs you incur. Keep your investment expenses low, for the tyranny of compounding costs can devastate the miracle of compounding returns.
Wise investors won't try to outsmart the market.
Successful investing is all about common sense.
In an ideal world, Adam Smith-like, individuals would recognize what they need to do in their own self-interest, and they will make changes happen and look after themselves.
I think high turnover is definitively the investor's enemy, so you don't want to bring a high-turnover philosophy to this business. You want to have a long-term philosophy.
A fiduciary standard means, basically, put the interests of the client first. No excuses. Period.
Well, bitcoin is a currency. Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return. You know, bonds have an interest coupon. Stocks have earnings and dividends. Gold has nothing, and bitcoin has nothing. There is nothing to support the bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to somebody for more than you paid for it.
I love the English language. Words have power.
At the beginning of my sophomore year at Princeton University, I took my first economics course; our textbook was the first edition of Samuelson's 'Economics: An Introductory Analysis.'
If you put nothing away for retirement, I can tell you, to the last penny, how much you will have when you retire: nothing.
My only regret about money is that I don't have more to give away.
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