Vanguard founder Bogle dies.
John Bogle, who popularized the low-cost index-based mutual fund as founder of Vanguard Group Inc. and insisted that most stock-picking money managers weren’t worth the fees they charged, has died. He was 89.
He died Wednesday in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the company announced in a statement. The cause was cancer, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, citing his family. He suffered the first of at least six heart attacks at age 31. In 1967 he had a pacemaker installed, and in 1996 he received a heart transplant.
By word and example, Bogle proselytized on behalf of patient, long-term investing in a diversified group of well-run companies.
He focused his advocacy on index funds, those that buy and hold the broadest mixes of stocks. He cautioned that the pursuit of quick trades and short-term profits typically helped investment advisers more than investors.
“The way to wealth for those in the business is to persuade their clients, ‘Don’t just stand there. Do something,” he wrote in “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” (2007). “But the way to wealth for their clients in the aggregate is to follow the opposite maxim: ‘Don’t do something. Just stand there.’ ”
Bogle’s formula turned Vanguard into the largest U.S. manager of stock and bond funds.
“He was a towering figure,” Burton Malkiel, a Princeton University economics professor and Vanguard board member since 1977, said in an interview. “The mutual-funds industry is infinitely better because of Jack Bogle.”
Bogle founded Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based Vanguard in 1974. Investors attracted to its low fees helped the firm overtake American Funds, managed by Los Angeles-based Capital Group Inc., in 2008 as the biggest U.S. stock and bond fund manager.