The Little Book of Common Sense Investing Quotes

“Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.” Stick to the good plan. Traditional”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The two greatest enemies of the equity fund investor are expenses and emotions.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“Owning the stock market over the long term is a winner's game, but attempting to beat the market is a loser's game.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“Buying funds based purely on their past performance is one of the stupidest things an investor can do.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The true investor . . . will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“It’s amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he’s paid a small fortune not to understand it.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The simple fact is that selecting a mutual fund that will outpace the stock market over the long term is, using Cervantes’ wonderful observation, like “looking for a needle in the haystack.” So I offer you Bogle’s corollary: “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“Gunning for average is your best shot at finishing above average.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, written 70 years ago: “It is dangerous . . . to apply to the future inductive arguments based on past experience, unless one can distinguish the broad reasons why past experience was what it was.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“buy and hold a diversified, low-cost portfolio that tracks the stock market.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The winning formula for success in investing is owning the entire stock market through an index fund, and then doing nothing. Just stay the course.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. Learning is to the Studious, and Riches to the Careful. If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“It will also tell you how easy it is to do just that: simply buy the entire stock market. Then, once you have bought your stocks, get out of the casino and stay out. Just hold the market portfolio forever. And that’s what the index fund does. This investment philosophy is not only simple and elegant. The arithmetic on which it is based is irrefutable. But it is not easy to follow its discipline. So”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.” Stick to the good plan.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, Updated and Revised: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“William of Occam nicely expressed the virtue of simplicity, essentially setting forth this precept: When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“In the short run the stock market is a voting machine . . . in the long run it is a weighing machine.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“One academic study showed that during the strong bull market of 1990–1996 the most active one-fifth of all stock traders turned their portfolios over at the rate of more than 21 percent per month. While they earned the annual market return of 17.9 percent during that bull market period, they incurred trading costs of about 6.5 percent, leaving them with an annual return of but 11.4 percent, only two-thirds of the market return.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“A return to sanity. In April 1999, the P/E ratio had risen to an unprecedented level of 34 times, setting the stage for the return to sanity in valuations that soon followed. The tumble in stock market prices gave us our comeuppance. With earnings continuing to rise, the P/E currently stands at 23.7 times, compared with the 15 times level that prevailed at the start of the twentieth century. As a result, speculative return has added just 0.5 percentage points to the annual investment return earned by our businesses over the long term.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“Our measure of the P/E ratio at the close of 2016 is based on the year-end price of 2247 for the S&P 500 relative to reported earnings for 2016 of $95 per share—a P/E of 23.7. Wall Street analysts tend to rely on operating earnings (before write-offs and other negatives) that are forecast for the coming year ($118 per share). Resulting P/E: 17.4 times.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“While illusion (the momentary prices we pay for stocks) often loses touch with reality (the intrinsic values of our corporations), it is reality that rules in the long run.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“[fundos geridos por] jovens brilhantes e dinâmicos que prometiam realizar milagres com o dinheiro das outras pessoas, […] [mas] que no fim inevitavelmente geraram prejuízos para o público”.”
― John C. Bogle, O Investidor de Bom Senso

“If you choose to invest in TDFs, I encourage you to “look under the hood” first. (Always a good idea!) Compare the costs of TDFs, and pay attention to their underlying structures. Many TDFs hold actively managed funds as components, whereas others use low-cost index funds. Make sure you know precisely what is in your TDF portfolio and how much you’re paying for it. The major actively managed TDFs have annual expense ratios that average 0.70 percent; index fund TDFs carry average expense ratios of 0.13 percent. It will not surprise you to know that I believe that low-cost, index-based target-date funds are likely to be your best option.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“I’ve often been cited as an advocate for a similar simple and seemingly rigid asset allocation: your bond position should equal your age, with the remainder in stocks. That asset allocation strategy can serve the needs of many—if not most—investors quite well, but it was never intended to be more than a rule of thumb, a place to begin your thought process.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

“My recommendations for investors in the accumulation phase of their lives, working to build their wealth, focused on a stock/bond mix of 80/20 for younger investors and 70/30 for older investors. For investors starting the post-retirement distribution phase, 60/40 for younger investors, 50/50 for older investors.”
― John C. Bogle, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns