John C. Bogle Quotes

Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't.

Institutions like mutual funds often worry that if they disclose their plans to buy a stock, copycats will move quickly and drive up the stock before the purchase is completed.

Proprietary stock-index arbitrage is but one aspect of program trading. Arbitrage will take place whenever there is an imbalance created in one or more markets that are similar.

Here is a dirty little secret: Stock-picking is wildly overrated. Sure, it makes for great cocktail party chatter, and what is more fun than delving into a company's new products? But the truth is that individual stocks are riskier than broad indices.

I'm from Berkeley, California, so I'm fully trained in socialism and all, but basically what they teach you there is markets are efficient and we can't beat them, so we might as well index.

Of course. I favor passive investing for most investors, because markets are amazingly successful devices for incorporating information into stock prices.

Companies are always being bought and sold. The markets are always moving; you have to be on top of your position. And in the U.S., the market is never closed for more than three days. The only time the market was ever closed was 9/11. I think it may have been closed the whole week.

The stock market is a discounter of all known information.

I don’t care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don’t want to see them go down the first day I am President.

One of the reasons why we can make a lot of money in equity markets is because they're auction-driven, and auction-driven markets are very different from almost any other kind of market.

In investing, you get what you don't pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won't be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.

I like Burton Malkiel's 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street.' He comes to the same conclusion that I do - that indexing is the way. My 'Little Book of Common Sense Investing' says pretty much the same thing.

Still, I figure we shouldn't' discourage fans of actively managed funds. With all their buying and selling, active investors ensure the market is reasonably efficient. That makes it possible for the rest of us to do the sensible thing, which is to index. Want to join me in this parasitic behavior? To build a well-diversified portfolio, you might stash 70 percent of your stock portfolio into a Wilshire 5000-index fund and the remaining 30 percent in an international-index fund.

"Now you can trade the S&P 500 Index in real time" was the slogan in the newspapers for the first ETF. What kind of nut would do that?

The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.

Buying securities is usually easier than selling securities.

I pay almost no attention to the charts.

Low-volatility funds, which tend to smooth out performance, have been especially popular since the financial crisis. The PowerShares S&P 500 Low Volatility Fund is the oldest, begun in 2011.

The markets are the world's greatest Rubik's cube. And I love solving puzzles.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

The market is my church; it's my family.

I was convinced that the trading frequency measured a fundamental heartbeat of financial markets. Clearly it reflected the flow of information. It turns out also to be closely related to measures of liquidity.

My advice to most people is don't short stocks. It's a very, very difficult business. And you can really get clobbered.

My father was really into it. We would wake up in the morning and look at the markets.

I've explained before the power psychology has on the markets.