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5 Pieces of Advice From John Bogle

The founder of Vanguard, who died on Wednesday, changed how ordinary people invested. Here are some of his tips.

John C. Bogle became a pioneer of index funds for ordinary investors.Credit...Ryan Collerd for The New York Times

John C. Bogle, who died on Wednesday, is widely seen as having changed how ordinary people invest their money. His firm, the Vanguard Group of Investment Companies, which grew to have $4.9 trillion under management, was built on a belief that, over the long term, most investment managers cannot outperform the broad stock market averages.

“Jack Bogle made an impact on not only the entire investment industry, but more importantly, on the lives of countless individuals saving for their futures or their children’s futures,” Tim Buckley, Vanguard’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Here are some of Mr. Bogle’s investment tips:

“Wise investors won’t try to outsmart the market,” he says. “They’ll buy index funds for the long term, and they’ll diversify.”

Long-term investors must hold stocks even though the market is risky, because they are still likely to produce better returns than the alternatives, Mr. Bogle said in 2012.

Investors should weather any storms, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2016.

“If we’re going to have lower returns, well, the worst thing you can do is reach for more yield. You just have to save more.”

Money managers missed all the warning signs before the 2008 financial crisis, Mr. Bogle noted:

“How could so many highly skilled, highly paid securities analysts and researchers have failed to question the toxic-filled, leveraged balance sheets of Citigroup and other leading banks and investment banks?”

In 2017, he waved younger investors away from financial advisers and gave his approval to robo-advisers.

“Unless you need a financial adviser to help you get started in that routine, you probably don't need a financial adviser at all,” he told CNBC.

Vanguard’s fund shareholders own it collectively, so there is no parent company or private owner to siphon profit, allowing the firm to keep costs down.

“In investing, you get what you don’t pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won’t be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.”

Mr. Bogle became a harsh critic in his later years of the mutual fund industry and the high fees charged to investors for stock-picking expertise.

Invest in a diverse selection of stocks and bonds, trust in the arithmetic and stick to it — this was the essence of Mr. Bogle’s advice for Vanguard investors. “Impulse is your enemy,” was one of the mantras.

“Eliminate emotion from your investment program. Have rational expectations for future returns and avoid changing those expectations in response to the ephemeral noise coming from Wall Street.”

Mr. Bogle was the leading proponent of structuring an investment portfolio to mirror the performance of a market yardstick, like the S&P 500 stock index.

“The S&P 500 is a great proxy,” Mr. Bogle told The Wall Street Journal last year, adding that he hadn’t bought an individual stock in about 25 years.

Mr. Bogle also told CNBC that the United States market was a safer bet than other markets. “U.S. companies are innovative and entrepreneurial,” he said.

Amie Tsang is a general assignment business reporter based in London, where she has covered a variety of topics, including the gender pay gap, aviation and the London fatberg. More about Amie Tsang

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Jack’s 5 Rules For Investing With Success. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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