John C. Bogle Quotes

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John C. Bogle

Profession : Businessman

Birth : May 8, 1929

Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.

John C. Bogle

I do think that impact investing is not that effective. Shares go from investor A to investor B, and the company doesn't even know it. It's inevitably an ineffective way to communicate to the company your feelings.

John C. Bogle

The reality of life is, if you have a bagel shop and everybody is pouring into the doughnut shop across the street, if you want to stay in business, you start selling doughnuts.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

There's no perfection in family life, and certainly we aren't perfect, but we're probably about as close as we can be.

John C. Bogle

I built a career out of knowing what I don't know.

John C. Bogle

Mutual funds with superior performance records often falter.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

I had done some work on index funds in my senior thesis at Princeton in 1951.

John C. Bogle

Central to the effective functioning of early capitalism was the fundamental principle of trusting and being trusted.

John C. Bogle

Entrepreneurs or international conglomerateurs, or large financial institutions buy or create mutual fund management companies to create a return on their own capital. It's capitalism at work, where the rewards tend to go to the managers rather than the investors.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

I spend about half of my time wondering why I have so much in stocks and about half wondering why I have so little.

John C. Bogle

What indexing does is neutralize a large part of the stock market. There's no trading in those stocks, or almost none.

John C. Bogle

Eliminate emotion from your investment program.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

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.

John C. Bogle

They were tough times and I started working when I was 10 years old, delivering papers and eventually becoming a waiter.

John C. Bogle

Invest as efficiently as you can, using low-cost funds that can be bought and held for a lifetime.

John C. Bogle

We make too much out of past performance, and it's very misleading to investors. It causes them to move money around. They buy a fund that's hot and then it turns cold as all hot funds eventually do. And then they get out. Well, buying at the high and selling at the low isn't going to leave you a satisfied shareholder, right?

John C. Bogle