Well, bitcoin is a currency. Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return. You know, bonds have an interest coupon. Stocks have earnings and dividends. Gold has nothing, and bitcoin has nothing. There is nothing to support the bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to somebody for more than you paid for it.
John C. Bogle
Net return is simply the gross return of your investment portfolio less the costs you incur. Keep your investment expenses low, for the tyranny of compounding costs can devastate the miracle of compounding returns.
It occurs to me that, after the huge output of writing I've produced over the years, there is a close link between my twin careers as investment executive and financial writer: The power of the word and the power of the book have played a major role in turning my vision... into reality.
The market is often stupid, but you can't focus on that. Focus on the underlying value of dividends and earnings.
My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn't have a sou.
Well, I like regulation as little as anybody else. It can be intrusive. It can be detailed. It can be bureaucratic. It can be unevenly administered. It can be unfair. But most regulations that we have for mutual funds and for banks are regulations that we earned. We did something wrong and we're paying a price for it.
My father's money vanished in the Great Depression, and he had trouble keeping a job.
Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.
I love the English language. Words have power.
The culture of the mutual fund industry, when I came into it in 1951, was pretty much a culture of fiduciary duty and investment, with funds run by investment professionals. The firm I worked with, Wellington Management Co., they had one fund. That was very typical in the industry... investment professionals focused on long-term investing.
What indexing does is neutralize a large part of the stock market. There's no trading in those stocks, or almost none.
I do think that impact investing is not that effective. Shares go from investor A to investor B, and the company doesn't even know it. It's inevitably an ineffective way to communicate to the company your feelings.
Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.
The best rule for philanthropy is to give until it hurts, as much as you can, because none of us can get through life all by ourselves.
As I have said before, the daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
When our financial system - essentially our money managers, marketers of investment products and stockbrokers - put up zero percent of the capital and assume zero percent of the risk yet receive fully 80% of the return, something has gone terribly wrong in our financial system.
Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that's essentially the idea behind the index fund.
Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one's early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.
Our financial system is driven by a giant marketing machine in which the interests of sellers directly conflict with the interests of buyers.
Vanguard never would have happened if I hadn't been fired as CEO of Wellington Management Company, the firm that did the investing for the Wellington fund and eight sister funds.
The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.
The malfeasance and misjudgments by our corporate, financial and government leaders, declining ethical standards, and the failure of our new agency society reflect a failure of capitalism.
Mutual funds with superior performance records often falter.
It is the power of words and books - explaining and dramatizing great ideas and articulating high ideals - that is the greatest weapon in the missionary's arsenal.
The basic idea of retirement income is, to me, to get a check, two checks every month, one from your fixed income and one from equity account. And you want them to grow over time.
While the interests of the business are served by the aphorism 'Don't just stand there. Do something!' the interests of investors are served by an approach that is its diametrical opposite: 'Don't do something. Just stand there!'
A fiduciary standard means, basically, put the interests of the client first. No excuses. Period.
If you were to just design the perfect retirement plan, you would own the stock market or you would own the bond market. You would get all the costs or all that you possibly could out of the system. So on an annual basis, if the market went up 8 percent, you would get 7.8 or 7.9 percent.
If we wanted something, we had to earn it.
While we would typically encourage young people to start saving for the future as early as possible, it's unlikely that a budding entrepreneur will be able to do so. The entrepreneur will need every bit of capital available for the business, which will likely crowd out personal savings.
The rewards of my life have been great. I built a company; I left things better than I found them. I have a good reputation. I put the Vanguard shareholders and crew first. That's a huge thing.
There no longer can be any doubt that the creation of the first index mutual fund was the most successful innovation - especially for investors - in modern financial history.
When a door closes, if you look long enough and hard enough, if you're strong enough, you'll find a window that opens.
If the fluctuations in your investment portfolio are reduced, the impact of emotions and behavior on your account is also reduced.
Every winter my wife and I take a week off and go to a resort in Florida.
New ideas that fly in the face of conventional wisdom of the day are always greeted with doubt and scorn, even fear.
I think average investors should not trade a lot. The evidence is overpowering. The more you trade, the less you earn.
The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for.
If you put nothing away for retirement, I can tell you, to the last penny, how much you will have when you retire: nothing.
Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.
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.
Working for company X and having a substantial portion of your retirement plan in company X is simply exposing yourself to too much risk, because the company is both your employer and the source of your retirement income. So if something goes wrong, you lose both your job and your retirement plan.
Invest as efficiently as you can, using low-cost funds that can be bought and held for a lifetime.
We have moved from treating funds as investment trusts designed to serve their owner-beneficiaries to treating funds as consumer products, designed to attract the largest possible assets. This new approach has ill-served the interests of fund shareholders.
I liked the so-called Volcker Rule. I would have separated investment banking and commercial, deposit banking, as we did under the Glass-Steagal Act. I would have brought back Glass-Steagal.
I tend to give to those who have helped me along the road of life: Blair Academy, Princeton University, our church, and several hospitals that got me here in one piece. On the community side, I've always been a big supporter of the United Way.
Diversification has been, and balance, like Wellington, has been so drummed into me, it's part of my personality.
Wise investors won't try to outsmart the market.
I was never the type who had a particular ambition. I had friends in college who would say, 'I want to be a vice president by the time I'm 35 years old.' A lot of people had these career plans. I didn't have any. I thought if I did my best, good things would happen.
The reality of life is, if you have a bagel shop and everybody is pouring into the doughnut shop across the street, if you want to stay in business, you start selling doughnuts.
