70+ The Vanguard of Investing: John Bogle's Quotes on Index Funds and More

John C. Bogle is an American investor and the founder of The Vanguard Group. He is credited with creating the first index fund, which revolutionized the investment industry. Bogle is also a strong advocate for low-cost investing and is considered one of the most influential figures in the world of finance. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John C. Bogle on education, leadership, government.

Top 10 John C. Bogle Quotes

1. Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.
2. Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.
3. Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!
4. Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.
5. Learn every day, but especially from the experiences of others. It's cheaper!
6. Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.
7. The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.
8. In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses.
9. Speculation leads you the wrong way. It allows you to put your emotions first, whereas investment gets emotions out of the picture.
10. If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks.

John C. Bogle Image Quotes

Learn every day, but especially from the experiences of others. It's cheaper! — John C. Bogle

John C. Bogle Short Quotes

• The principal role of the mutual fund is to serve its investors.
• On balance, the financial system subracts value from society
• I believe - deeply and profoundly - that speculation is a loser's game.
• If it is hard to imagine that 20% of losses on the stock market, you should never participate
• Capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme. Capitalism is a scheme of free markets.
• I will create value for society, rather than extract it.

John C. Bogle Quotes About Investing

Surprise! The returns reported by mutual funds aren't actually earned by mutual fund investors. — John C. Bogle

Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts, and in part on your ability to realize at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike that this too shall pass. — John C. Bogle

We need a mutual fund industry with both vision and values; a vision of fiduciary duty and shareholder service, and values rooted in the proven principles of long-term investing and of trusteeship that demands integrity in serving our clients. — John C. Bogle

Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong. — John C. Bogle

Successful investing is about owning businesses and reaping the huge rewards provided by the dividends and earnings growth of our nation's - and, for that matter, the world's - corporations. — John C. Bogle

The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything. — John C. Bogle

The multiple failings of our flawed financial sector are jeopardizing, not only the retirement security of our nation's savers but the economy in which our entire society participates. — John C. Bogle

Hint: money flows into most funds after good performance, and goes out when bad performance follows. — John C. Bogle

"Now you can trade the S&P 500 Index in real time" was the slogan in the newspapers for the first ETF. What kind of nut would do that? — John C. Bogle

The miracle of compounding returns has been overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs. — John C. Bogle

John C. Bogle Quotes About Investment

The returns we read about in the industry sales literature vastly diminish when we move from the theoretical world of market indexes to the real world of actually investing. — John C. Bogle

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. — John C. Bogle

The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor. — John C. Bogle

Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient. — John C. Bogle

I think it's gone much too far. Most of them are not worth the powder to blow them to hell. — John C. Bogle

It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it. — John C. Bogle

If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong. — John C. Bogle

The stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investing. — John C. Bogle

It's 1450 out of 1500 ETF funds that I just wouldn't touch because they're not diversified enough. Or they have some huge speculative twist to them that if you can guess the markets right you will do very well for a day or two but who can do that? Nobody. — John C. Bogle

If your fund doesn't last for the long term, how can you invest for the long term? — John C. Bogle

John C. Bogle Famous Quotes And Sayings

Learn every day, but especially from the experiences of others. It's cheaper! — John C. Bogle

In Las Vegas we all know that it's the croupiers who win. At the race track, it's those who control the handle who win. State lotteries, does anybody think the participants in the lottery win? No. The state wins. — John C. Bogle

Income earned by the sweat of your brow should be taxed at the lowest rates, not the highest. Capital gains should be taxed at a higher rate. — John C. Bogle

The courage to press on regardless - regardless of whether we face calm seas or rough seas, and especially when the market storms howl around us - is the quintessential attribute of the successful investor. — John C. Bogle

But whatever the consensus on the EMH, I know of no serious academic, professional money manager, trained security analyst, or intelligent individual investor who would disagree with the thrust of EMH: The stock market itself is a demanding taskmaster. It sets a high hurdle that few investors can leap. — John C. Bogle

Yes, the investor is often his own worst enemy. Yes, the marketing colossus known as the mutual fund industry provides the weaponry which enables investors to indulge their suicidal instincts. No, the fund industry was hardly an innocent bystander in the market boom and the subsequent carnage. "We have met the enemy and he is us"... all of us. — John C. Bogle

So the misplaced assumption is that we have this whole new institutional element where these [financial] institutions are looking after their own financial interests before the financial interests of the principals, princi-pals whose interests they are really bound to observe first. — John C. Bogle

We live in a very risky world and investors should not get "carried away" with excessive allocations to equities, or for that matter, real estate. As always asset allocation and low cost and broad diversification will be essential in earning one's fair share of whatever returns our financial markets are generous enough to bestow upon us. — John C. Bogle

If you're very talented and keep winning, you'll do just fine. It may take a while. But the talent is hard to identify and talent is hard to tell from luck. There's an awful lot of luck in this business. Past performance is not helpful in judging future performance. — John C. Bogle

Without getting into brothels, there are ethical capitalists the problem is that there aren't enough of them. It is not "just a few bad apples" that have been evident in our corporations, our investment bankers and our mutual funds, but so many that one has to concede that the barrel itself needs some work. — John C. Bogle

While the apostles of the new so-called "behavioral" theory present ample evidence of how often human beings make irrational financial decisions, it remains to be seen whether these decisions lead to predictable errors that create systematic mispricings upon which rational investors can readily and economically capitalize. — John C. Bogle

Corporate leaders surely have their problems, I believe that most CEOs are doing their best to hew to the ethical line. The problem is that that line has gotten blurred and that our moral standard seems to be "if everybody else is doing it, it's okay". That's not good enough for me. — John C. Bogle

I think it's fairly easy to provide a moral defense of capitalism. It has been - over the last 200 years - the underlying basis for enormous increases in productivity and human welfare and rising living standards, particularly in the United States, and in the industrialized nations but in fact, in most parts of the world. — John C. Bogle

The transfer of Wall Street from private ownership to public ownership has been a big step backward. — John C. Bogle

I'm not currently into economic textbooks, but my grandchildren tell me that the book by Gregory Mankiw, former head of the white house council of economic advisers is a model of intelligence and clarity. Why not try that one. — John C. Bogle

I believe that the mutual fund industry's biggest shortcoming is too much focus on the momentary price of a stock - an illusion - and too little focus on the intrinsic value of the corporation - the ultimate reality. I'm comforted by the fact that Warren Buffett feels the same way. — John C. Bogle

The relationship between executive CEO pay, stock performance is tenuous and not easily unscrambled, just one of myriad factors that affect the price of a stock. — John C. Bogle

You know the rule of 72, divide the number into 72, any number you want, and that's how long it will take your money to double. — John C. Bogle

Among my greatest disappointments about the mutual fund industry - in addition to excessive costs and excessive focus on the short-term - is that fund managers have been passive participants in corporate governance. — John C. Bogle

We are facing incredible challenges in the economy of the U.S. and the economy of the globe, but the stock market, we never know whether it's over-discounted or under-discounted or got exactly right its anticipation. — John C. Bogle

It's very difficult for any particular segment of the stock market to sustain superior performance. The watch word for our financial markets is, "reversion to the mean" i.e. what goes up must come down, and it's true more often than you can imagine. — John C. Bogle

The business has some problems, substantial problems. You go fix it, you young people. That's what you're there for. Don't believe what the old generation tells you. We don't know a damn thing, including Bogle. — John C. Bogle

I'm not an expert on Islam, but I think there are lots of noble religions whose basic principles could stand considerably more observation in the world of business. — John C. Bogle

The fund scandals shined the spotlight on the fact that mutual fund managers were putting their interests ahead of the fund shareholders who trusted them, which had much more substantial consequences in the form of excessive fees and the promotion - as the market moved into the stratosphere - of technology funds and new economy funds which were soon to collapse. — John C. Bogle

My biggest prediction for the future is that people are going to start looking after individual investors. — John C. Bogle

We need to reorganize our entire system of retirement plan investing and to develop federal standards of fiduciary duty for pension trustees and fund managers. These require "top down" intervention. But we also need investors to look after their own economic interests, a bottom up approach to our problems that is well within our individual power to undertake. — John C. Bogle

Ask yourself: Am I an investor, or am I a speculator? An investor is a person who owns business and holds it forever and enjoys the returns that U.S. businesses, and to some extent global businesses, have earned since the beginning of time. Speculation is betting on price. Speculation has no place in the portfolio or the kit of the typical investor. — John C. Bogle

I believe that the behavior of too many of our corporations investment bankers and fund managers has jeopardized some of the trust that investors have had. It's not the economic engine that we need to focus on, but the need to make sure that our investors receive their fair share of the returns that that great economic system produces. — John C. Bogle

I was born in an earlier generation and, as a group, my classmates at Blair Academy and Princeton University were as ethical, straightforward, and integrity laden as you could possibly imagine - perhaps not a 100% - but the overwhelming majority. I've been in business a long, long time and I simply cannot imagine seeking out cheating, greedy people. — John C. Bogle

I'd be the first to agree that capitalism bestows its blessings unevenly. But that wouldn't persuade me to think it was a good idea to do away with those blessings in their entirety. That said, there is lots of work to be done to make capitalism work better, and to broaden its blessings far more widely not only in America, but all over the globe. — John C. Bogle

Thomas Aquinas defined the human soul as the core of our being, and the power that brings our characteristics into unity so the soul of capitalism - in its own temporal world as contrasted to the spiritual world of human beings - is what defines the core of the system and the factors that unify to produce the wonderful world that we are blessed to live in. — John C. Bogle

Sure there are some companies at the margins of our society that probably do that and I think we all have the responsibility as consumers and as investors to avoid them like the plague. If we do, they won't last very long. Doing what's right is the only possible formula for long-term - I emphasize long term - business success. — John C. Bogle

The mistakes we make as investors is when the market's going up, we think it's going to go up forever. When the market goes down, we think it's going to go down forever. Neither of those things actually happen. Doesn't do anything forever. It's by the moment. — John C. Bogle

I think we all ought to be careful about too much generalization on this issue, even as I confess to painting with a pretty broad brush myself! — John C. Bogle

While I haven't read economist Robin Hahnel's work, replacing capitalism would be at the very bottom of my list of priorities - to be considered only after everything else had been tried. Improving our capitalistic system however, is at the top of my list and is of course the major theme of "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism." — John C. Bogle

Life Lessons by John C. Bogle

1. John C. Bogle's work emphasizes the importance of investing in low-cost index funds and avoiding high-cost actively managed funds.
2. He also stresses the importance of diversification and long-term investing, rather than trying to time the market or take on too much risk.
3. Finally, he emphasizes the importance of minimizing fees and expenses, as these can have a significant impact on the long-term performance of investments.