Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The transfer of Wall Street from private ownership to public ownership has been a big step backward.
I would advise someone who has just retired to be something in the broad range of 50/50 stocks and bonds.
My biggest prediction for the future is that people are going to start looking after individual investors.
I almost hate to say how proud I am of my career and, most of all, helping folks get the returns they deserve.
I've been studying mutual funds since 1949, when I began researching my senior thesis at Princeton University.
The market is often stupid, but you can't focus on that. Focus on the underlying value of dividends and earnings.
Diversification has been, and balance, like Wellington, has been so drummed into me, it's part of my personality.
I spend about half of my time wondering why I have so much in stocks and about half wondering why I have so little.
New ideas that fly in the face of conventional wisdom of the day are always greeted with doubt and scorn, even fear.
In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses.
It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.
Central to the effective functioning of early capitalism was the fundamental principle of trusting and being trusted.
What indexing does is neutralize a large part of the stock market. There's no trading in those stocks, or almost none.
I think average investors should not trade a lot. The evidence is overpowering. The more you trade, the less you earn.
When a door closes, if you look long enough and hard enough, if you're strong enough, you'll find a window that opens.
There's no perfection in family life, and certainly we aren't perfect, but we're probably about as close as we can be.
They were tough times and I started working when I was 10 years old, delivering papers and eventually becoming a waiter.
The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.
If you put nothing away for retirement, I can tell you, to the last penny, how much you will have when you retire: nothing.
Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.
Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that's essentially the idea behind the index fund.
The long-term focus of index funds is a much needed counterweight to the short-termism favored by so many market participants.
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.
If the fluctuations in your investment portfolio are reduced, the impact of emotions and behavior on your account is also reduced.
My incentive in starting Vanguard, I'm very blunt about this, it was my means of preserving my career. That's a very selfish thing.
Speculation leads you the wrong way. It allows you to put your emotions first, whereas investment gets emotions out of the picture.
"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 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.
Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.
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.
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.
Our financial system is driven by a giant marketing machine in which the interests of sellers directly conflict with the interests of buyers.
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.
Have rational expectations for future returns and avoid changing those expectations in response to the ephemeral noise coming from Wall Street.
I think we all ought to be careful about too much generalization on this issue, even as I confess to painting with a pretty broad brush myself!
What we need is congressional action to establish a federal principle of fiduciary duty - encapsulated by the phrase 'no man can serve two masters.'
I'm not sure I really am an entrepreneur. I'm not much of a businessman. I know I'm not a marketing guy. I do have an entrepreneurial lineage, though.
The relationship between executive CEO pay, stock performance is tenuous and not easily unscrambled, just one of myriad factors that affect the price of a stock.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With actively managed funds, people have big behavior problems. With funds that have done well, they put their money in, and when it has done bad, they want to take it out.
I think high turnover is definitively the investor's enemy, so you don't want to bring a high-turnover philosophy to this business. You want to have a long-term philosophy.
Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.
There is no country like the United States, with its diversified industrial base, technology leadership, innovation and strong pressure to build companies to make them grow.
The returns we read about in the industry sales literature vastly diminish when we move from the theoretical world of market indexes to the real world of actually investing.
In an ideal world, Adam Smith-like, individuals would recognize what they need to do in their own self-interest, and they will make changes happen and look after themselves.
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.
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.