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What drove investing pioneer Jack Bogle? "Never feeling one damn moment of doubt," he said.
What drove investing pioneer Jack Bogle? "Never feeling one damn moment of doubt," he said. "I am who I am, the hell with it."
Link to tweet
MARKETS | THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR
What Drove Jack Bogle to Upend Investing
For Vanguard’s founder, much of life was a near-death experience
By Jason Zweig
https://twitter.com/jasonzweigwsj
intelligentinvestor@wsj.com
Jan. 18, 2019 7:00 a.m. ET
History will remember Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Group, as the great democratizer of capitalism, the person who made it possible for just about everyone to afford to buy a stake in stocks and bonds. ... I will remember him as the most extraordinary combination of stubbornness and flexibility I have ever encountered. Mr. Bogle died on Jan. 16 at the age of 89. ... His achievements—creating the first index fund for individual investors, lowering the costs of investing almost to the vanishing point—are all the more remarkable because, for him, life itself was a near-death experience.
I first met Mr. Bogle in 1993 when I was a young mutual-funds editor and he was Vanguard’s chairman and chief executive. Then in his early 60s, Mr. Bogle already looked as if he had spent decades in hand-to-hand combat with the Angel of Death—as, indeed, he had. Multiple near-fatal heart attacks had gnarled his hands, creased his craggy face with wrinkles and yellowed his eyes.
{SNIP}
But he still crackled with the physical and intellectual energy, as well as the obsessive drive, that had enabled him to build Vanguard into an investment giant out of nothing. He didn’t merely speak; he thundered and fulminated in a baritone growl. ... And, unlike anybody else in the financial industry, Mr. Bogle said exactly what he was thinking, on the record. The way most investment firms treated their clients was “shameful.” Most mutual funds’ annual expenses were “larcenous.” The attempt to beat the market was “a fool’s game.” Brokers’ commissions were “like highway robbery.”
To many of his competitors, Mr. Bogle’s criticisms sounded so sanctimonious, even hypocritical, that they sneeringly nicknamed him “St. Jack.” ... Mr. Bogle hadn’t always been his own industry’s harshest critic. Like St. Paul, the former persecutor of the first Christians, Mr. Bogle blazed with the zeal of the convert; he knew about high fees and performance-chasing firsthand. He had long defended many of the industry practices he eventually derided. ... In an article he wrote under the pseudonym “John B. Armstrong” for the Financial Analysts Journal in 1960, Mr. Bogle trashed the idea of an index fund that would buy and hold all the stocks in a market benchmark. The concept was so flawed it would underperform by about 0.75 percentage points annually, he estimated. Mr. Bogle approvingly quoted a critic saying that “the relative inflexibility of these funds makes them undesirable for the average investor.”
....
I last spoke with Mr. Bogle in November, six months after his 89th birthday and nearly 23 years after he received a heart transplant. He told me he had just had a pacemaker implanted and was trying to recover from an esophageal infection. The day before, he’d had an endoscopy. ... And there he was on the phone, preparing for a video interview we were scheduled to do in December at an industry conference. (Later, he backed out on doctors’ orders.) ... One question I teed up: What had driven him against all odds? “Never feeling one damn moment of doubt,” he shot back. “I am who I am, the hell with it.”
What Drove Jack Bogle to Upend Investing
For Vanguard’s founder, much of life was a near-death experience
By Jason Zweig
https://twitter.com/jasonzweigwsj
intelligentinvestor@wsj.com
Jan. 18, 2019 7:00 a.m. ET
History will remember Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Group, as the great democratizer of capitalism, the person who made it possible for just about everyone to afford to buy a stake in stocks and bonds. ... I will remember him as the most extraordinary combination of stubbornness and flexibility I have ever encountered. Mr. Bogle died on Jan. 16 at the age of 89. ... His achievements—creating the first index fund for individual investors, lowering the costs of investing almost to the vanishing point—are all the more remarkable because, for him, life itself was a near-death experience.
I first met Mr. Bogle in 1993 when I was a young mutual-funds editor and he was Vanguard’s chairman and chief executive. Then in his early 60s, Mr. Bogle already looked as if he had spent decades in hand-to-hand combat with the Angel of Death—as, indeed, he had. Multiple near-fatal heart attacks had gnarled his hands, creased his craggy face with wrinkles and yellowed his eyes.
{SNIP}
But he still crackled with the physical and intellectual energy, as well as the obsessive drive, that had enabled him to build Vanguard into an investment giant out of nothing. He didn’t merely speak; he thundered and fulminated in a baritone growl. ... And, unlike anybody else in the financial industry, Mr. Bogle said exactly what he was thinking, on the record. The way most investment firms treated their clients was “shameful.” Most mutual funds’ annual expenses were “larcenous.” The attempt to beat the market was “a fool’s game.” Brokers’ commissions were “like highway robbery.”
To many of his competitors, Mr. Bogle’s criticisms sounded so sanctimonious, even hypocritical, that they sneeringly nicknamed him “St. Jack.” ... Mr. Bogle hadn’t always been his own industry’s harshest critic. Like St. Paul, the former persecutor of the first Christians, Mr. Bogle blazed with the zeal of the convert; he knew about high fees and performance-chasing firsthand. He had long defended many of the industry practices he eventually derided. ... In an article he wrote under the pseudonym “John B. Armstrong” for the Financial Analysts Journal in 1960, Mr. Bogle trashed the idea of an index fund that would buy and hold all the stocks in a market benchmark. The concept was so flawed it would underperform by about 0.75 percentage points annually, he estimated. Mr. Bogle approvingly quoted a critic saying that “the relative inflexibility of these funds makes them undesirable for the average investor.”
....
I last spoke with Mr. Bogle in November, six months after his 89th birthday and nearly 23 years after he received a heart transplant. He told me he had just had a pacemaker implanted and was trying to recover from an esophageal infection. The day before, he’d had an endoscopy. ... And there he was on the phone, preparing for a video interview we were scheduled to do in December at an industry conference. (Later, he backed out on doctors’ orders.) ... One question I teed up: What had driven him against all odds? “Never feeling one damn moment of doubt,” he shot back. “I am who I am, the hell with it.”
