John C. Bogle Quotes

Author Image

John C. Bogle

Profession : Businessman

Birth : May 8, 1929

My father's money vanished in the Great Depression, and he had trouble keeping a job.

John C. Bogle

New ideas that fly in the face of conventional wisdom of the day are always greeted with doubt and scorn, even fear.

John C. Bogle

I've usually used the phrase 'stay the course' as one of the great rules of investment success.

John C. Bogle

Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

A fiduciary standard means, basically, put the interests of the client first. No excuses. Period.

John C. Bogle

While the interests of the business are served by the aphorism 'Don't just stand there. Do something!' the interests of investors are served by an approach that is its diametrical opposite: 'Don't do something. Just stand there!'

John C. Bogle

The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.

John C. Bogle

Well, I like regulation as little as anybody else. It can be intrusive. It can be detailed. It can be bureaucratic. It can be unevenly administered. It can be unfair. But most regulations that we have for mutual funds and for banks are regulations that we earned. We did something wrong and we're paying a price for it.

John C. Bogle

I love the English language. Words have power.

John C. Bogle

The market is often stupid, but you can't focus on that. Focus on the underlying value of dividends and earnings.

John C. Bogle

There's no such thing as wealth without risk.

John C. Bogle

It seems to me - particularly for these retirement-plan investors, the vast majority of whom are not particularly financially sophisticated - by far the best way is to invest in index funds.

John C. Bogle

I like Burton Malkiel's 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street.' He comes to the same conclusion that I do - that indexing is the way. My 'Little Book of Common Sense Investing' says pretty much the same thing.

John C. Bogle

Never underrate the importance of asset allocation.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle