Bogle: Stop Gambling and Invest

In a recent interview, Vanguard founder Jack Bogle said investors should “get out of the casino”, and practice real investing — not speculative trading.

“Get out of the casino, own Corporate America and hold it forever,” Bogle, long a proponent of buy-and-hold index funds, said during ‘The Big Interview’ on MoneyLife with Chuck Jaffe, according to MarketWatch. “No trading, no nothing. You don’t need to trade; you don’t need to worry about the market. To protect yourself from the bumps the stock market will scare you with — even though it shouldn’t scare you because there have been bumps in the market since the beginning of time — have a bond position to go along with your stock position, and have your bond position [the proportion of your assets in bonds] … have something to do with your age.”

Bogle says that while the financial services industry perpetuates the myth that investors can outsmart the market, individual investors should take some of the blame for continuing to try to win a losing game. “The stock market is a mysterious and often misleading thing,” he says. “It creates no value, zero value, for investors. In fact … it shifts value from investors to participants in the system, brokers, investment bankers, money managers and things like that. Value is created not by stock prices, but by stock intrinsic values, by corporations that have staggering amounts of capital … they put that money to work, they earn a return on it in a competitive world. … That’s what investing is about, owning companies.”