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John Bogle on Investing The First 50 Years

Name: John Bogle on Investing The First 50 Years
Author: John C. Bogle
ISBN: 9780071364386

by John C. Bogle

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Overview

A 20th Century Visionary Looks to the 21st Century

John C. Bogle --Vanguard Founder and No-Load Pioneer -- Talks about Finance, Economics, Mutual Funds, Stewardship, and Idealism

John C. Bogle is one of the 20th century's towering financial giants. Deeply concerned by the devastating impact of high mutual fund costs on the long-term returns earned by investors, he founded Vanguard in 1974. In the space of a few years, he introduced the index mutual fund, pioneered the modern no-load mutual fund, and redefined bond fund management. By creating a novel mutual fund enterprise owned by its shareholders, he gave millions of investors a new and high-powered way to invest and was among the first authoritative voices to challenge the financial establishment.

And John Bogle is still in there fighting. John Bogle on Investing contains the best of the scores of speeches he's delivered over the years and revisits the important investment themes from which Bogle rarely strayed during his illustrious career:

The majesty of simplicity in investment strategy
The productive economics of long-term investing
The counterproductive emotions that can forfeit investment success
The universality of indexing in the financial markets
Minimizing the "fiscal drag" of sales charges, management fees, turnover costs, and opportunity cost

Within these covers you will find nothing less than the rock solid foundation of success in independent investing for the 21st century. Tough, insightful, and relentless in its drive for fairness and honesty, John Bogle on Investing creates a high standard for McGraw-Hill's new Great Ideas in Finance series-and then surpasses that standard, page after page.

"John C. Bogle ... has the mind of an economist and the personality of a preacher." -Washington Post

One half century ago, an "insecure but determined" Princeton undergrad was already showing signs of becoming a maverick. Barely out of his teens but already firm in his convictions that mutual fund shareholders were not receiving a fair shake, the budding financier turned in an exhaustively researched magna cum laude thesis entitled The Economic Role of the Investment Company.

That student was John Clifton Bogle, and that thesis -- groundbreaking, innovative, and reprinted word-for-word in these pages for the first time -- unalterably changed the future course of investing. John Bogle on Investing is a 50-year compendium that recounts in the best possible words -- his own -- the storied career of Jack Bogle, the man who has been called "the conscience of the mutual fund industry."

"Bogle is rattling the status quo among the mutual fund titans." -Fortune

In its 26 chapters, John Bogle on Investing presents 25 speeches and one masterful thesis. They all revolve around one common theme: Efficient, economical, and honest alternatives must be made available to all investors of all wealth levels. Just as important, these investors must understand the choices available to them. From sensible discussions of wealth accumulation and investment risk, through a provocative call-to-arms regarding investment costs, each selection is exceptionally well written and meticulously researched.

In all, the book is classic Bogle. Whether discussing the virtues of low-expense indexing ("Low cost, marginal in its annual impact, becomes overwhelming as the years roll on") or the hazards that bull markets may create ("When reward is at its pinnacle, risk is near at hand"), John C. Bogle never fails to lay his cards face-up on the table for all to see.

And we, the readers, emerge the winners.

If you are serious about substantially improving your long-term investment returns, and you read just one book this year, make it John Bogle on Investing. If you plan on reading two books, you should consider reading John Bogle on Investing twice.

It's that valuable, that entertaining, and that good. John C. Bogle is one of the great financial figures of the 20th century, and this book encapsulates much of the work and wisdom of his 50-year mutual fund career. By reading John Bogle on Investing, you can learn in one evening much of the knowledge John C. Bogle spent 50 years acquiring.

In a lifetime devoted to giving a fair shake to the human beings who invest to secure their financial future, this book may be Bogle's best bargain yet.

About the Author, John C. Bogle

John Bogle

John C. Bogle is founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group and President of its Bogle Financial Markets Research Center. He created Vanguard in 1974 and served as chairman and chief executive officer until 1996 and senior chairman until 2000. In 1999, Fortune magazine named Mr. Bogle as one of the four "Investment Giants" of the twentieth century; in 2004, Time named him one of the world's 100 most powerful and influential people; and Institutional Investor presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

This book is the first comprehensive review of the distinguished career and contributions of John Bogle, the investing icon recently chosen by Fortune as one of the four key financial figures of the 20th century. From his never-before-published Princeton thesis to nearly two dozen essays covering five decades of market strategy, Bogle offers insights and methods of value to investors at all levels.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The author of two classic books, Bogle on Mutual Funds (1993) and Common Sense on Mutual Funds (1999), Bogle has been a strong voice for sensible, efficient, honest financial management throughout his career. In 1951, for his undergraduate economics thesis at Princeton, he wrote the first comprehensive analysis of the modern mutual fund. He then spent 25 years working in the fund industry before founding Vanguard, and another 25 years running that company. This omnibus begins with the 1951 thesis and includes articles and speeches over the next half-century. Unfortunately, 17 of the 26 chapters are speeches from the two years leading up to publication, which are really the same recycled speech with a few introductory paragraphs tailored to the audience. The older material, especially the thesis and a 1975 speech about the founding of Vanguard, will be extremely interesting only to Bogle's biographer and to Ph.D. students writing about the history of the mutual fund industry. General readers will be impressed with Bogle's consistency, though that is hardly adequate reward for 480 pages of mostly dull reading. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Bogle, founder of the enormous Vanguard family of no-load mutual funds, has long been one of the strongest voices for low-cost mutual funds and shareholder rights. Here, he gathers some of the speeches he has delivered over the past three decades (but most within the last few years). His themes are the failure of the mutual-fund industry to provide adequate returns, the value of index funds, the proper role of funds in corporate governance, the origins of Vanguard, and his own career. He also includes his 1951 Princeton undergraduate thesis on the economic role of mutual funds. Because so many of the speeches are recent, they hold timely information, though there is some repetition of ideas from one to another. This is an important collection by one of the major figures in mutual funds, and it belongs in every library with more than cursory holdings on investing. However, Bogle's other books, Bogle on Mutual Funds (LJ 10/15/93) or Common Sense on Mutual Funds (Wiley, 1999), would be more appropriate for the casual reader.--Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A 1951 Princeton thesis and 25 lectures from the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Funds. Bogle illustrates the tenets of his successful investing career in this collection, the first in the Great Ideas in Finance series. Three basic rules guide his work. First, investors should be aware of the costs of investing: since mutual funds charge an annual management fee that ranges from one percent of assets to over two percent, the difference of a percentage point compounded over many years adds up to a lot of money. Second, investors must be willing to invest for the long term: commissions on multiple trades and taxes on short-term gains eat away at profits. Third, investors should buy index funds (like Vanguard): index funds buy stocks in the same proportion as the S&P 500 or the Wilshire 500 indices and, with America growing perpetually, index funds will capture this increase. Index funds also have lower costs because of less required management and less trading. This advice—buy index funds, invest for the long term, and watch costs—is included in 24 of the 25 lectures. The one exception discusses organ donation: Bogle, the recipient of a heart transplant in 1995, writes of his experience and then tells the story of Nicholas Evans. A seven-year-old American boy, Evans died in Italy in 1995, and his family donated seven of his organs to Italian children—a story of American kindness in a dark hour. And Bogle's college thesis ("The Economic Role of the Investment Company"), while it may have been cutting-edge in 1951, is rather quaint today. A weird mixture of personal narrative and straightforward advice.