Một cái nhìn của sư tổ về đầu tư thế giới (cần người dich ra Việt ngữ)
By JEFF SOMMER
Correction Appended
VANGUARD, the penny-pinching mutual fund company founded by John C. Bogle, has become a colossus. Its index funds — once derided for not even trying to beat the market — are now the industry standard.
And after at least six heart attacks and one heart transplant, Mr. Bogle has managed to witness this triumph. “It’s all a kind of a miracle,” he says in a booming baritone. “It’s really nice that I’m able to see this happen in my own lifetime.”
With this kind of medical history, any other man of 83 might simply enjoy his success. But not John Bogle. He is still on a mission, as outspoken as ever and nearly as vigorous — thanks, he says, to the heart of a younger man. He’s not done yet.
“It’s urgent that people wake up,” he says. Why? This is the worst time for investors that he has ever seen — and after more than 60 years in the business, that’s saying a lot.
Start with the economy, the ultimate source of long-term stock market returns. “The economy has clouds hovering over it,” Mr. Bogle says. “And the financial system has been damaged. The risk of a black-swan event — of something unlikely but apocalyptic — is small, but it’s real.”
Even so, he says, long-term investors must hold stocks, because risky as the market may be, it is still likely to produce better returns than the alternatives.
“Wise investors won’t try to outsmart the market,” he says. “They’ll buy index funds for the long term, and they’ll diversify.
“But diversify into what? They need alternatives, bonds, for the most part. What’s so frightening right now is that the alternatives to equities are so poor.”
In the financial crises of the last several years, he says, investors have flocked to seemingly safe government bonds, driving up prices and driving down yields. The Federal Reserve and other central banks have been pushing down interest rates, too.
But low yields today predict low returns later, he says, and “the outlook for bonds over the next decade is really terrible.”
Dark as this outlook may be, he says, people need to “stay the course” if they are to have hope of buying homes or putting children through college or retiring in comfort.
He is still preaching the gospel of long-term, low-cost investing. “My ideas are very simple,” he says: “In investing, you get what you don’t pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won’t be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.”
Still, because the market and the economy are deeply troubled, it’s time for action on many fronts, he says: “We’ve really got no choice. We’ve got to fix this system. All of us, as individuals, need to do it.”
That’s the message of his latest and 11th book, “The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation” (Wiley & Sons, $29.95). It offers a scathing critique of the financial services industry and updated guidance for investors. “A culture of short-term speculation has run rampant,” he writes, “superseding the culture of long-term investment that was dominant earlier in the post-World War II era.”
Too much money is aimed at short-term speculation — the seeking of quick profit with little concern for the future. The financial system has been wounded by a flood of so-called innovations that merely promote hyper-rapid trading, market timing and shortsighted corporate maneuvering. Individual investors are being shortchanged, he writes.
Corporate money is flooding into political campaigns. The American retirement system faces a train wreck. America’s fundamental values are threatened. Mr. Bogle remains a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist but says the system has “gotten out of balance,” threatening our entire society. “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else,” he says, quoting Winston Churchill. Now, he says, it’s time to try something else.
He advocates taxes to discourage short-term speculation. He wants limits on leverage, transparency for financial derivatives, stricter punishments for financial crimes and, perhaps most urgently, a unified fiduciary standard for all money managers: “A fiduciary standard means, basically, put the interests of the client first. No excuses. Period.”
Those clients — the ordinary people to whom he has always appealed — need to protect themselves from peril, he says: “In an ideal world, Adam Smith-like, individuals would recognize what they need to do in their own self-interest, and they will make changes happen and look after themselves.”
MR. BOGLE sometimes disagrees with current Vanguard management, but he remains proud of the company he created. Index funds are ever more popular, and Vanguard is gushing money, torrents of it. Thanks largely to its various index funds, Vanguard, which is based near Valley Forge, Pa., pulled in a net $87.7 billion in cash this year through June, excluding money market funds. That’s nearly 40 percent of the cash flow of the entire mutual fund industry.
Burton Malkiel, the Princeton economist and author of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” says: “Index funds are so popular now that it’s easy to forget how courageous and tenacious Jack Bogle was in starting them. They were called Bogle’s Folly because all they did was replicate the returns of the market. But, of course, that’s a great deal. In the academic world many people saw the wisdom of this — but Jack is the guy who actually made it happen.”
Mr. Bogle also tried to ensure that Vanguard funds would always be cheap to buy and hold. While Vanguard is his baby, he has never had an ownership stake in it aside from the shares he holds in its mutual funds. Vanguard fund shareholders own the place collectively because he planned it that way.
“Strategy follows structure,” he says, explaining that with no parent company or private owners to siphon profits, Vanguard can keep costs lower than anyone else. That was always his goal. “The only way anyone can really compete with us on costs is to adopt a mutual ownership structure,” he says. “I’ve been waiting all these years for someone to do it, but no one has.”
One reason is surely that there’s no profit in it. Despite Vanguard’s size and success, Mr. Bogle is no billionaire. For comparison, Forbes lists the personal wealth of Edward C. Johnson 3d, the chairman of Fidelity, as $5.8 billion. By contrast, Mr. Bogle says his own wealth is in the “low double-digit millions.” Most of it is in Vanguard and Wellington mutual funds in which he invested via payroll deduction during his long career.
During his peak earning years at Vanguard, he regularly gave half his salary to charities, including two alma maters — the Blair Academy, a prep school in Blairstown, N.J., and Princeton University. He was a scholarship student at both, holding down part-time jobs to help pay his way. At Princeton, in a senior thesis, he sketched the rough outlines of the cost-cutting, shareholder-serving company that would become Vanguard.
Mr. Bogle continues to make donations to several causes. “My only regret about money is that I don’t have more to give away,” he says.
WHILE he has no operational role at Vanguard, he hasn’t entirely left it. He works on its campus, heading the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center, a small research institute that provides him with a bully pulpit, which he tries to use in the energetic mode of his hero, Theodore Roosevelt. “There aren’t many of us Roosevelt Republicans left,” he said.
Mr. Bogle may be a Republican, but he voted for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and plans to vote for Mr. Obama again. He says government regulation of the financial industry is insufficient, and he endorses the Volcker Rule, named for his friend, Paul A. Volcker, the former Fed chairman, who says regulated banks shouldn’t be making risky bets with their own money.
Mr. Volcker, in turn, embraces Mr. Bogle’s critique of the financial services industry. At a public forum held in Manhattan last winter to celebrate Mr. Bogle’s legacy, Mr. Volcker said that the only unequivocally good financial innovation out of Wall Street in the last 25 years was the bank A.T.M. (If he went back 40 years, Mr. Volcker said, he would include Mr. Bogle’s invention of the index fund.) And Mr. Volcker said that a unified fiduciary standard “is an excellent solution.”
The research institute is financed by Vanguard but is independent, allowing Mr. Bogle to write books and make fiery speeches that sometimes differ from Vanguard policies.
At the moment, for example, he supports a crucial part of a Securities and Exchange Commission proposal to tighten rules on money market funds. “Investors shouldn’t be misled into believing these funds are as safe as a bank account,” he says. “They’re not.”
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