Once I joined the military and had a steady paycheck I started putting some money away each month. Fast forward twenty-something years and I’m so so so grateful to have had that influence which gives me optionally in my life.
No doubt investing with vanguard had a huge influence on their lives and I can’t imagine how many millions have been impacted.
Dollar cost averaging ftw!
On the one hand total market index exposure is fantastic.
On the other it’s accumulating more and more with a few firms giving them exceptional power.
Does this unravel at some point? It’s hard to think the index itself could go bad but perhaps everything behind the scenes could fall apart?
They really did feel like this bastion of customer focused passive investing in the brokerage industry for a _long_ time. They eventually helped seriously popularize index funds to the point where every major firm offers a low cost index fund, because they have to to compete. They continued to lower their fees whenever they could to the point where VTSAX is .04% (with their ETFs being even lower).
He even turned down an offer to create the first ETF (I forget the guy that brought the idea to him), but he explained the idea to Bogle and Bogle politely declined because he thought that having the ability for intraday trading went against the Vanguard model of set and forget passive investing. That guy eventually went to the firm that runs SPY, if I recall from the book. They eventually began offering ETFs, obviously, but Bogle was always more of a mutual fund guy from the way that book puts it.
Bogle really seemed to be for the people. The man was wealthy, but not nearly as wealthy as he could be because they continued lowering fees. Their mutualized fund structure is also a massive part of that.
After he left Vanguard, you saw more traditional brokerage offerings - more active funds and more pushes for offer advisors to you over the phone. If I recall, Bogle expressed some displeasure in that.
You can tell I'm a Bogle fanboy, but I'll gladly wear that badge.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42938221-stay-the-course
They are no longer the cheapest UK ETF or fund provider in any category, and their Vanguard Investor platform isn't the cheapest either.
When you invest in an American stock market index fund, you get a highly diversified financial instrument at a fee that is so low that it is nearly free. You're buying into the proceeds of the strongest cultural force that is stronger in America than anywhere else in the world: greed. The force underlying your investment is that every CEO of every public company in America is working to make you richer, because if they succeed at making you richer, they've made themselves much richer in the process. You are investing in the greed of thousands of public company CEOs. When their greed pays off, you get paid off.
No American president, least of all Donald Trump, is going to stop the raw power of American greed, and that's not going to change without some kind of religious revolution of morals in a country that has become increasingly less religious over time.