John Bogle, RIP

In 1974, Paul Samuelson wrote Challenge to judgement, a searing critique of money managers. Samuelson challenged the money managers to show that they could beat the market. He concluded that “a respect for evidence compels me to incline toward the hypothesis that most portfolio decision makers should go out of business.” Samuelson hoped for something new:

At the least, some large foundation should set up an in-house portfolio that tracks the S&P 500 Index — if only for the purpose of setting up a naive model against which their in-house gunslingers can measure their prowess.

Inspired by Samuelson, John Bogle created the first index fund in 1976 and it quickly…failed. In the initial underwriting the fund raised only $11.3 million, which wasn’t even enough to buy a minimum portfolio of all the stocks in the S&P 500! The street crowed about “Bogle’s folly” but Bogle persevered and in so doing he benefited millions of investors, saving them billions of dollars is fees. As Warren Buffet said today:

Jack did more for American investors as a whole than any individual I’ve known. A lot of Wall Street is devoted to charging a lot for nothing. He charged nothing to accomplish a huge amount.

The creation of the index fund is a great example of how economic theory and measurement can improve practice. Our course on Money Skills at MRU is very much influenced by Bogle. Tyler and I recommend index funds and Vanguard in particular. In the videos and in our textbook we present data from Bogle’s book Common Sense on Mutual Funds. Here’s the first video in the series.