The Bogle Effect

How John Bogle and Vanguard Turned Wall Street Inside Out and Saved Investors Trillions

By: Eric Balchunas

Narrated by: Mike Lenz

The index fund was just one innovation fueled by The Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle's radical idea in 1975 to make investors the actual owners of his new fund company. The end result was powerful: a fund company for the people and by the people.

But Bogle's impact and this "great cost migration" reaches well beyond index funds into many other areas, such as active management, ETFs, the advisory world, quantitative investing, ESG, behavioral finance, and even trading platforms. The Bogle Effect takes listeners through each of these worlds to show how they—and the investors they serve—are being reshaped and reformed.

While hundreds of fund providers have copied the index fund that Vanguard made popular no one is yet to copy its "mutual" ownership structure. Why? This book explores what made Bogle such an anomaly—seemingly immune to the overwhelming magnet of ambition that dictates Wall Street.

The Bogle Effect is animated by the author's hours of exclusive one-on-one interviews with Bogle in the years before he passed, which reveal his philosophy, vision, intellect, and humor.

©2022 Eric Balchunas (P)2022 Tantor

Important book

This is a great book. I don’t think the “final word” on Jack Bogle has yet been written and it’s such a complex subject (that can seem simple) that reading additional biographies and JB’s own books is so important.

The life & teaching St. Jack of Bogle

Excellent distillation of the virtues, foibles, and legacy of the father of index investing, the terror of AUM advising, the scourge of high fees, doubting Thomas of ETFs, the mutual-mutual man of the people, and the Admiral of Vanguard.