Markets Magazine
Q&A With Jack Bogle: ‘We’re in the Middle of a Revolution’
The Vanguard founder on the power of indexing—and being thought of as a bomb‑throwing Marxist rebel.
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John “Jack” Bogle wrote his Princeton senior thesis in 1951, arguing that mutual funds “may make no claim to superiority over the market averages.” Sixty-five years later, the Vanguard founder is still being forced to defend his argument—perhaps now more than ever.
When Bogle started the first index fund in 1976, his goal was capturing the overall market’s return at much lower costs than the stockpicking fund managers who so often failed to match it. The wisdom of this passive approach has become so conventional that Vanguard’s assets under management have swollen to $3.5 trillion, mostly in index funds.