John Bogle, the Apostle of Index Funds, Never Gave Up
His ideas were initially dismissed as “folly,” but today Vanguard has $5 trillion under management.
He shouted from the rafters: Stay the course!
Photographer: Ken Cedeno/Bloomberg
To be perfectly crass about it, you would have made an awful lot of money if you had followed the advice of John Bogle, the Vanguard founder, better known as Jack, who died Wednesday at the age of 89.
In 1976, a year after starting the Vanguard Group, as it’s now known, Bogle introduced the first index fund geared to individual investors. This was an era, recall, when what mattered most if you ran a mutual fund company was to have a handful of star fund managers you could market. Peter Lynch, John Neff, Bill Miller, John Templeton — these were the financial heroes of the 1970s and 1980s, renowned for their ability to outperform the market.