John (Jack) Bogle

Born: Montclair, New Jersey, in 1929

Affiliations:

•Wellington Management Company
•Vanguard Group, Inc.
•Vanguard Group's Bogle Financial Markets Research Center.

Most Famous For: Bogle founded the Vanguard Group mutual fund company in 1974 and made it into one of the world's largest and most respected fund sponsors. Bogle pioneered the no-load mutual fund and championed low-cost index investing for millions of investors. He created and introduced the first index fund, Vanguard 500, in 1976. In 1999, Fortune Magazine named Bogle one of the four "investment giants" of the twentieth century. (For related reading, see Index Investing and The Lowdown On Index Funds.)

Investment Style

In simple terms, Jack Bogle's investing philosophy advocates capturing market returns by investing in broad-based index mutual funds that are characterized as no-load, low-cost, low-turnover and passively managed. He has consistently recommended that individual investors focus on the following themes:

•The primacy of investing simplicity
•Minimizing investment-related costs and expenses
•The productive economics of a long-term investment horizon
•A reliance on rational analysis and an avoidance of emotions in the investment decision-making process
•The universality of index investing as an appropriate strategy for individual investors
Super stock trader Jim Cramer (TheStreet.com and CNBC's "Mad Money") pays Bogle's investment style the ultimate compliment by going on record as saying that "After a lifetime of picking stocks, I have to admit that Bogle's arguments in favor of the index fund have me thinking of joining him rather than trying to beat him." (To read more about Jim Cramer, see Mad Money … Mad Market?)

Publications

•"Bogle On Mutual Funds" by John C. Bogle (1994)

•"Common Sense On Mutual Funds: New Imperatives For The Intelligent Investor" by John C. Bogle (1999)

•"John Bogle On Investing: The First 50 Years" by John C. Bogle (2000)

•"The Little Book Of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way To Guarantee Your Fair Share Of Stock Market Returns" by John C. Bogle (2007)

•"The Vanguard Experiment: John Bogle's Quest To Transform The Mutual Fund Industry" by Robert Slater (1996)

Bogle Quotes:

"Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy."

"If you have trouble imaging a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks."

"When reward is at its pinnacle, risk is near at hand."

Personal Profile

Jack Bogle graduated magna cum laude with a degree in economics from Princeton University in 1951. He studied mutual funds in depth during his university days, which culminated in his senior-year economics thesis and laid the conceptual groundwork for the index mutual fund.

He learned the investment management business by working for financial advisor Wellington Management from 1951 to 1974 and founded Vanguard in the latter year, becoming its CEO and chairman before retiring in 1999 from an active role in the company. As president of Vanguard's Bogle Financial Markets Research Center, he continues to write and lecture on investment issues and is widely recognized as "the conscience" of the mutual fund industry. (For more insight, see Mutual Fund Basics and Picking The Right Mutual Fund.)

In "The Vanguard Experiment: John Bogle's Quest to Transform the Mutual Fund Industry" (1996), biographer Robert Slater describes Bogle's life as "evolutionary, iconoclastic and uncompromisingly committed to his founding principles of putting the interests of the investor first and constructively criticizing the fund industry for practices that run counter to low-cost, client-oriented mutual fund investing."