The Man Beat Wall Street

I am referring, of course, to John Bogel, the founder of Vanguard, and the man who gave us the index fund, which showed that the self-appointed masters of the universe on Wall Street did worse than a random throw of the dice.

He died yesterday, aged 89:

John C. Bogle, who founded the Vanguard Group of Investment Companies in 1974 and built it into a giant mutual fund company, with $4.9 trillion in assets under management today, died on Wednesday at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 89.

His personal assistant, Michael Nolan, said the cause was esophageal cancer. Mr. Bogle, who had struggled with a congenital heart defect and had several heart attacks, received a heart transplant in 1996.

Mr. Bogle built Vanguard, which is based in Malvern, Pa., on a cornerstone belief that was anathema to most mutual fund companies: that over the long term, most investment managers cannot outperform the broad market averages. He popularized and became the leading proponent of indexing, the practice of structuring an investment portfolio to mirror the performance of a market yardstick, like the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.

“Indexing was the purview of institutional investors, but Jack Bogle came up with the consumer version,” said Daniel P. Wiener, the editor of The Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors, a newsletter and website that has tracked the company for decades. “He made people aware of expenses, and told them that costs come right out of the bottom line.”

But Mr. Bogle became a harsh critic of the mutual fund industry in later years. In the second half of the 1990s, he said, stock market investors were spoiled by average annual returns of more than 20 percent per year and, as a result, cared too little about the high expenses they were paying to mutual fund managers for those managers’ presumed expertise at picking stocks. Mutual fund companies, he said, were all but immoral for accepting such fees.

He was right.