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Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist organization — it has no shareholders, makes no profits, and operates more like REI than Fidelity. If you own a Vanguard fund, you own a piece of the firm itself. Any excess margin instead gets returned to clients in the form of lower fees, which since 1975 have added up to roughly five hundred billion dollars transferred out of Wall Street managers’ pockets and into retail investors’ savings accounts. And oh yeah, it all started as a cockamamie revenge plot by a guy who’d just been fired by his partners. Today we tell the story of communist capitalism at its finest — Vanguard.
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Links:
• This episode's PDF companion • Sign up for email updates, get our takeaways and research photos from each episode, and vote on future topics! • Our Vanguard "episode preview" in WSJ • Stay the Course: The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution by John C. Bogle • The Bogle Effect by Eric Balchunas • Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Vanguard Study • Worldly Partners' Article Generational Investing: The Discipline Behind 100+x Outcomes • All episode sources
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Start Intro Jack Bogle's Early Life & Family Ruin (1929) Princeton Thesis & Mutual Funds Emerge (1949-1951) Joining Wellington Management (1951) The Go-Go Years & Fidelity's Ascent (1958-1965) Jack Takes the Reins & The Ivest Merger (1965) The Go-Go Bust & Jack's Crisis of Conscience (1970-1973) Jack is Fired: The Genesis of Vanguard (1974)