Review by Choice Review
John Bogle founded The Vanguard Group, the second largest mutual fund family. This volume, the first in McGraw-Hill's "Great Ideas in Finance" series, contains 25 of his speeches presented to industry groups, investor organizations, college and high school classes, and general audiences from 1971 to 2000, organized in four sections: investment strategy, the mutual fund industry, the history of Vanguard, and personal perspectives. The basic theme--low-cost, long-term investing using index funds--is exceptionally well articulated throughout the first three sections. In the fourth section, readers learn something of Bogle the man from five speeches reflecting on his personal philosophy. A fifth section contains Bogle's 1951 undergraduate thesis, which sets out some of the ideas that led to the formation of Vanguard in 1974. This is not his best book for the novice investor, who will find Bogle's Common Sense on Mutual Funds (1999) a better introduction to investing and mutual funds. His new book is highly recommended for individual investors, investment professionals, and students of the mutual fund industry, lower-division undergraduate and up. D. A. Latzko Pennsylvania State University, York Campus
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Bogle made news last year when he unsuccessfully challenged the mandatory retirement policy at Vanguard Group, the mutual funds investment company that he founded in 1974 and that he continued to serve as senior chairman. Bogle has always been well regarded by the press and by Vanguard's 14 million shareholders. He pioneered both no-load and index investment funds and he constantly criticized other companies for their high fees and service charges. The inaugural title in McGraw-Hill's Great Ideas in Finance series, this collection is a fitting tribute to Bogle. It consists of 25 speeches that he made throughout his career. These cover investment strategy, the mutual fund industry, and Bogle's view of human values and the philosophy of investing. Five of the speeches were made before general audiences; one is a high-school commencement address; another discusses organ donation (Bogle is the recipient of a heart transplant). The book concludes with the text of the dissertation Bogle submitted for graduation from Princeton University in 1951; it sets out the ideas that led to the formation of Vanguard nearly a quarter century later. --David Rouse
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The author of two classic books, Bogle on Mutual Funds (1993) and Common Sense on Mutual Funds (1999), Bogle has been a strong voice for sensible, efficient, honest financial management throughout his career. In 1951, for his undergraduate economics thesis at Princeton, he wrote the first comprehensive analysis of the modern mutual fund. He then spent 25 years working in the fund industry before founding Vanguard, and another 25 years running that company. This omnibus begins with the 1951 thesis and includes articles and speeches over the next half-century. Unfortunately, 17 of the 26 chapters are speeches from the two years leading up to publication, which are really the same recycled speech with a few introductory paragraphs tailored to the audience. The older material, especially the thesis and a 1975 speech about the founding of Vanguard, will be extremely interesting only to Bogle's biographer and to Ph.D. students writing about the history of the mutual fund industry. General readers will be impressed with Bogle's consistency, though that is hardly adequate reward for 480 pages of mostly dull reading. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bogle, founder of the enormous Vanguard family of no-load mutual funds, has long been one of the strongest voices for low-cost mutual funds and shareholder rights. Here, he gathers some of the speeches he has delivered over the past three decades (but most within the last few years). His themes are the failure of the mutual-fund industry to provide adequate returns, the value of index funds, the proper role of funds in corporate governance, the origins of Vanguard, and his own career. He also includes his 1951 Princeton undergraduate thesis on the economic role of mutual funds. Because so many of the speeches are recent, they hold timely information, though there is some repetition of ideas from one to another. This is an important collection by one of the major figures in mutual funds, and it belongs in every library with more than cursory holdings on investing. However, Bogle's other books, Bogle on Mutual Funds (LJ 10/15/93) or Common Sense on Mutual Funds (Wiley, 1999), would be more appropriate for the casual reader.DLawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A 1951 Princeton thesis and 25 lectures from the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Funds. Bogle illustrates the tenets of his successful investing career in this collection, the first in the Great Ideas in Finance series. Three basic rules guide his work. First, investors should be aware of the costs of investing: since mutual funds charge an annual management fee that ranges from one percent of assets to over two percent, the difference of a percentage point compounded over many years adds up to a lot of money. Second, investors must be willing to invest for the long term: commissions on multiple trades and taxes on short-term gains eat away at profits. Third, investors should buy index funds (like Vanguard): index funds buy stocks in the same proportion as the S&P 500 or the Wilshire 500 indices and, with America growing perpetually, index funds will capture this increase. Index funds also have lower costs because of less required management and less trading. This advicebuy index funds, invest for the long term, and watch costsis included in 24 of the 25 lectures. The one exception discusses organ donation: Bogle, the recipient of a heart transplant in 1995, writes of his experience and then tells the story of Nicholas Evans. A seven-year-old American boy, Evans died in Italy in 1995, and his family donated seven of his organs to Italian childrena story of American kindness in a dark hour. And Bogles college thesis (The Economic Role of the Investment Company), while it may have been cutting-edge in 1951, is rather quaint today. A weird mixture of personal narrative and straightforward advice.
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