Best 69 quotes of John C. Bogle on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

Capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme. Capitalism is a scheme of free markets.

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.

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

Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong.

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

I believe - deeply and profoundly - that speculation is a loser's game.

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.

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.

I believe Washington should be a more active participant focusing on the issue of why corporate shareholders and mutual fund shareholders are not given fair treatment by corporate management and mutual fund management. We need to develop a national standard of fiduciary duty to ensure that these agents, if you will, are adequately representing the principles - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund shareholders - whom they are duty bound to serve.

If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong.

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

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.

If your fund doesn't last for the long term, how can you invest for the long term?

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.

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.

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.

Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.

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.

In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.

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

"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?

On balance, the financial system subracts value from society

Our capitalistic scheme in the latter years of the 20th century seems to have lost its way. We've had a "pathalogical change" from traditional owners capitalism where most of the rewards have gone to those who make the investments and assume the risks to a new and deeply flawed system of managers capitalism where the managers of our corporations our investment system, and our mutual funds are simply take too large a share of the returns generated by our corporations and mutual funds leaving the last line investors - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund owners at the bottom of the food chain.

Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.

Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.

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.

Speculation leads you the wrong way. It allows you to put your emotions first, whereas investment gets emotions out of the picture.

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.

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

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.

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.

The general systems of money management today require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. Mutual funds charge two percent per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another three to four percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals.

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.

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

The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. Yet market timing appears to be increasingly embraced by mutual fund investors and the professional managers of fund portfolios alike.

The miracle of compounding returns has been overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.

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.

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.