John C. Bogle
Learn every day, but especially from the experiences of others. It's cheaper!Collection: Cheaper
The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.Collection: Data
Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.Collection: Risk
In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses.Collection: Running
Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.Collection: Life
The mistakes we make as investors is when the market's going up, we think it's going to go up forever. When the market goes down, we think it's going to go down forever. Neither of those things actually happen. Doesn't do anything forever. It's by the moment.Collection: Mistake
If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks.Collection: Money
Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts, and in part on your ability to realize at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike that this too shall pass.Collection: Character
The courage to press on regardless - regardless of whether we face calm seas or rough seas, and especially when the market storms howl around us - is the quintessential attribute of the successful investor.Collection: Successful
Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.Collection: Business
Ask yourself: Am I an investor, or am I a speculator? An investor is a person who owns business and holds it forever and enjoys the returns that U.S. businesses, and to some extent global businesses, have earned since the beginning of time. Speculation is betting on price. Speculation has no place in the portfolio or the kit of the typical investor.Collection: Forever
Speculation leads you the wrong way. It allows you to put your emotions first, whereas investment gets emotions out of the picture.Collection: Way
The general systems of money management today require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. Mutual funds charge two percent per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another three to four percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals.Collection: Years
I believe - deeply and profoundly - that speculation is a loser's game.Collection: Believe
The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.Collection: Mutual Fund
It's very difficult for any particular segment of the stock market to sustain superior performance. The watch word for our financial markets is, "reversion to the mean" i.e. what goes up must come down, and it's true more often than you can imagine.Collection: Mean
The miracle of compounding returns has been overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.Collection: Miracle
It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.Collection: Men
The stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investing.Collection: Giants
Successful investing is about owning businesses and reaping the huge rewards provided by the dividends and earnings growth of our nation's - and, for that matter, the world's - corporations.Collection: Successful
I will create value for society, rather than extract it.Collection: Values
You know the rule of 72, divide the number into 72, any number you want, and that's how long it will take your money to double.Collection: Numbers
I believe Washington should be a more active participant focusing on the issue of why corporate shareholders and mutual fund shareholders are not given fair treatment by corporate management and mutual fund management. We need to develop a national standard of fiduciary duty to ensure that these agents, if you will, are adequately representing the principles - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund shareholders - whom they are duty bound to serve.Collection: Believe
Hint: money flows into most funds after good performance, and goes out when bad performance follows.Collection: Hints
Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong.Collection: Investing
We live in a very risky world and investors should not get "carried away" with excessive allocations to equities, or for that matter, real estate. As always asset allocation and low cost and broad diversification will be essential in earning one's fair share of whatever returns our financial markets are generous enough to bestow upon us.Collection: Real
If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong.Collection: Winning
Income earned by the sweat of your brow should be taxed at the lowest rates, not the highest. Capital gains should be taxed at a higher rate.Collection: Sweat
The principal role of the mutual fund is to serve its investors.Collection: Roles
Surprise! The returns reported by mutual funds aren't actually earned by mutual fund investors.Collection: Investing
In Las Vegas we all know that it's the croupiers who win. At the race track, it's those who control the handle who win. State lotteries, does anybody think the participants in the lottery win? No. The state wins.Collection: Winning
I believe that the mutual fund industry's biggest shortcoming is too much focus on the momentary price of a stock - an illusion - and too little focus on the intrinsic value of the corporation - the ultimate reality. I'm comforted by the fact that Warren Buffett feels the same way.Collection: Believe
If you're very talented and keep winning, you'll do just fine. It may take a while. But the talent is hard to identify and talent is hard to tell from luck. There's an awful lot of luck in this business. Past performance is not helpful in judging future performance.Collection: Winning
I think it's fairly easy to provide a moral defense of capitalism. It has been - over the last 200 years - the underlying basis for enormous increases in productivity and human welfare and rising living standards, particularly in the United States, and in the industrialized nations but in fact, in most parts of the world.Collection: Thinking
I believe that the behavior of too many of our corporations investment bankers and fund managers has jeopardized some of the trust that investors have had. It's not the economic engine that we need to focus on, but the need to make sure that our investors receive their fair share of the returns that that great economic system produces.Collection: Believe
The grim irony of investing, then, 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. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.Collection: Groups
My biggest prediction for the future is that people are going to start looking after individual investors.Collection: People
The transfer of Wall Street from private ownership to public ownership has been a big step backward.Collection: Wall
The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. Yet market timing appears to be increasingly embraced by mutual fund investors and the professional managers of fund portfolios alike.Collection: Years
I'd be the first to agree that capitalism bestows its blessings unevenly. But that wouldn't persuade me to think it was a good idea to do away with those blessings in their entirety. That said, there is lots of work to be done to make capitalism work better, and to broaden its blessings far more widely not only in America, but all over the globe.Collection: Blessing
If your fund doesn't last for the long term, how can you invest for the long term?Collection: Long
Our capitalistic scheme in the latter years of the 20th century seems to have lost its way. We've had a "pathalogical change" from traditional owners capitalism where most of the rewards have gone to those who make the investments and assume the risks to a new and deeply flawed system of managers capitalism where the managers of our corporations our investment system, and our mutual funds are simply take too large a share of the returns generated by our corporations and mutual funds leaving the last line investors - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund owners at the bottom of the food chain.Collection: Leaving
We need to reorganize our entire system of retirement plan investing and to develop federal standards of fiduciary duty for pension trustees and fund managers. These require "top down" intervention. But we also need investors to look after their own economic interests, a bottom up approach to our problems that is well within our individual power to undertake.Collection: Retirement
We need a mutual fund industry with both vision and values; a vision of fiduciary duty and shareholder service, and values rooted in the proven principles of long-term investing and of trusteeship that demands integrity in serving our clients.Collection: Integrity
Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.Collection: Investing
On balance, the financial system subracts value from societyCollection: Balance
I think it's gone much too far. Most of them are not worth the powder to blow them to hell.Collection: Blow
I'm not an expert on Islam, but I think there are lots of noble religions whose basic principles could stand considerably more observation in the world of business.Collection: Thinking
If it is hard to imagine that 20% of losses on the stock market, you should never participateCollection: Loss