City profile

Jack Bogle Although he was “a folk hero to investing nerds” and an “outspoken enemy of selfserving financial advisers”, Jack Bogle, who has died aged 89, was never a household name, said Bloomberg. A strange omission, because “the father of the index fund” arguably did more than anyone else in recent decades to shape the way ordinary people invest. Bogle’s key insight – don’t bother with stock-picking banker types, they’re mediocre, just buy all the stocks in the index – was incendiary back in the 1970s when he founded his fund house, Vanguard, said The Wall Street Journal. So was his assault on rapacious fees. But his message that investment could be “simple as pie and cheap as dirt” struck home forcefully, and sparked a revolution. Some $10trn globally is now held in “passive” investments. Even Bogle sometimes wondered whether he’d unleashed a monster: in later life, he railed against the risk posed by the ubiquity of exchange-traded funds, which he worried were being manipulated by speculators. But history will remember him as a champion of democratic capitalism, says the FT. “He became one of the greatest men in the history of investing by ripping asunder the ‘great man’ image of supreme, cerebral stock-pickers.” As Bogle concluded: “nearly all of those experts whom we identify as stars prove to be comets”. During his last public outing, at a meeting of his “Bogleheads” disciples in October, he looked “worn and frail”, said the WSJ. But his voice retained its vigour as he merrily butchered “a herd of sacred cows”.