Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.
John C. BogleIt's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.
John C. BogleThe grim irony of investing, then, 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. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.
John C. BogleI was born in an earlier generation and, as a group, my classmates at Blair Academy and Princeton University were as ethical, straightforward, and integrity laden as you could possibly imagine - perhaps not a 100% - but the overwhelming majority. I've been in business a long, long time and I simply cannot imagine seeking out cheating, greedy people.
John C. BogleThe 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.
John C. BogleOur capitalistic scheme in the latter years of the 20th century seems to have lost its way. We've had a "pathalogical change" from traditional owners capitalism where most of the rewards have gone to those who make the investments and assume the risks to a new and deeply flawed system of managers capitalism where the managers of our corporations our investment system, and our mutual funds are simply take too large a share of the returns generated by our corporations and mutual funds leaving the last line investors - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund owners at the bottom of the food chain.
John C. Bogle