Vanguard's financial advice revolution

Vanguard’s financial-planning product is transparent, cheap and low-hassle. The competition had better watch out

Vanguard founder Jack Bogle
Vanguard’s founder Jack Bogle: genuinely disruptive
(Image credit: © Leif Skoogfors/Getty Images)

Jack Bogle, the late founder of giant asset manager Vanguard, made a huge difference to the finances of private investors across the world by popularising the use of index funds. These offer a cheap way to copy the return on an underlying stock index and in the process, beat most active managers over the long run. Bogle showed investors that if you could get the average return at a below-average cost, you would enjoy better returns with less stress than someone who chased complex but costly strategies instead. In other words, focus on the thing you can control (the price of investing) rather than the one that you can’t (attempts to beat the market).

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Sign up
John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.