John C Bogle is the founder and former CEO of Vanguard-he launched the first index mutual fund way back in 1976. Till this day he remains one of the most vocal proponents of passive indexing.
I am reproducing an interesting extract from his interview that appeared in ‘Investment Advisor’ issue of May 2010.
This is what he said...although it is in the American context; a quintessential Indian investor who is investing in equities in order to benefit from the long-term India growth story should take note of Mr Bogle advice,
“...the index fund simply gives you the returns earned by American business and those returns are very similar to the growth of earnings in corporate America and are very similar, and this shouldn't surprise anybody, to the growth of our GDP, the growth of the American economy.
So in fact you're getting a share in American business or a share in America when you buy an index fund. You can hold it forever. You don't have to worry about the portfolio manager changing. This is a world where the portfolio manager changes every five years for mutual funds.
So if you're investing for a lifetime, and it's very important to get this idea out there, and you have four mutual funds, that means you have four managers in five years, eight managers in 10 years, 16 managers in 20 years and 32 managers in 40 years.
Anybody seriously put forth the proposition that you can beat the market when you have 40 managers in 50 years.”
Link to the entire interview,
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