John C. Bogle Quotes

I'm making a case against how money managers are handling customers' money. The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that's not the way wealth is created.

Investing is a probabilistic business. Every once in a while, it's sort of like you're throwing six-sided dice, and anything except a one or a two, you're doing well. Statistically speaking, you throw the dice enough times, you're going to throw a one or a two five times in a row, and you're going to look pretty foolish, right?

Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.

The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.

People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.

For us, whether the market is skewed from a bubble perspective or not really is mitigated by staying focused on what we do best.

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

But my system for over 30 years has been this: When stocks are attractive, you buy them. Sure, they can go lower. I've bought stocks at $12 that went to $2, but then they later went to $30.

Investors have to ask themselves two questions. How much can we grow our investments? And, can we afford our mistakes?

It's difficult to make your clients understand that there are certain days that the market will go up or down 2%, and it's basically driven by algorithms talking to algorithms. There's no real rhyme or reason for that. So it's difficult. We just try to preach long-term investing and staying the course.

A financial crisis is a great time for professional investors and a horrible time for average ones.

I have a million dollars in the stock market, because if I lose a million dollars, I don't personally care.

You have a class of investors and you have a class of speculators. The speculators historically haven't been big enough to cause the investors to doubt the long-term vision of stock.

Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.

The beauty of diversification is it's about as close as you can get to a free lunch in investing.

Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.

I have no complaints about losing money I put in high-risk investments. I did some of that when I had real money; my informed choice, my measured gamble.

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

I'm sometimes accused of being hostile to mutual funds. That's not fair, really. There is a place for them. Still, I am hostile to one thing, which is trying to use funds to time your way in and out of the market. That's a recipe for very bad results.

What I invest in, while not risky for me, may be too risky for most people.

Because in the New Normal you are more worried about the return of your capital, not return on your capital.

There's no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It's next to impossible.

If the investor doesn't have enough time and skill to investigate individual stocks or enough money to diversify a portfolio, the right thing to do is to invest in exchange-traded funds that give you exposure to asset classes. It does make sense for the individual investor to think in terms of holding individual asset classes.

In the investment business, you must expect to be wrong.

Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money.