John C. Bogle Quotes

Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.

The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.

Learn every day, but especially from the experiences of others. It's cheaper!

In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses.

Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.

Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.

Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.

If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks.

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.

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.

Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.

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.

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.

Speculation leads you the wrong way. It allows you to put your emotions first, whereas investment gets emotions out of the picture.

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.

I believe - deeply and profoundly - that speculation is a loser's game.

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.

The miracle of compounding returns has been overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.

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.

The stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investing.

It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.

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.

Hint: money flows into most funds after good performance, and goes out when bad performance follows.

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.