John Bogle dies at 89; fought for lower fees for investors

When he lost his job running a mutual fund company after stocks tanked in the early 70's, John C Bogle decided that money managers knew very little about predicting the market and charged way too much for that lack of knowledge.

He founded a new fund company, Vanguard, in 1974.

Two years later, Vanguard introduced the first index fund for individual investors a vehicle that simply tracks the performance of an index like the S&P 500.

It was no frills and enabled investors to avoid the higher fees assessed by professional fund managers who frequently failed to beat the market.

The fund, called First Index Investment Trust, was derided for years as "Bogle's folly."
In a statement Wednesday, the investor advocate group Better Markets called Bogle "a tireless advocate for the small investor and the conscience of the financial industry."
But Bogle continued to maintain that many funds were overcharging investors, and once called the industry "the poster-boy for one of the most baneful chapters in the modern history of capitalism."
Vanguard has a unique corporate structure in which its mutual funds and fund shareholders are the corporation's "owners."
And if the data don't show indexing wins, well then, the data are wrong."