Early Life
John Clifton Bogle was born on May 8 1929 in Montclair, New Jersey as the youngest of two twins born to William Yates Bogle Jr. and Josephine Lorraine Hipkins, and went by “Jack” from an early age.
Like many families, the Bogles were hit badly by the Great Depression that hit mere months after John’s birth. They lost all their money when their bank collapsed, which forced them to sell their home so they could survive.
To help the family, John and his twin brother, David, got part-time jobs working in an ice cream parlor and delivering newspapers despite not even being teenagers.
The loss of his entire life’s savings and home deeply affected John’s father, who turned to alcoholism to cope, in turn leading to John’s mother divorcing him and taking custody of John and David.
Moving halfway across the state to the village of Manasquan, John and David attended Manasquan High School, where they excelled academically, allowing them to transfer to the more prestigious Blair Academy on scholarships.
Whilst at Blair, John began to show an aptitude for math and developed an interest in economics, particularly the world of investing, partly thanks to growing up in the wake of the Great Depression.
It was this interest in economics/investing and aptitude for math that allowed him to graduate Blair cum laude and get accepted to Princeton, studying economics and investment.
Once at Princeton, John’s interest in investing only grew and he began to study the mutual fund industry for his thesis, with the hope of joining one of the big firms, working his way up and earning lots of money along the way to support his mother who’d done everything to get him educated.
His thesis, titled: “The Economic Role of the Investment Company” took a deep dive into the industry and suggested several new ways existing companies could improve. The 130-page thesis earned him an A+.
Wellington Fund
Much to his surprise, John’s thesis was ready by Walter L. Morgan, the founder of the Wellington Management Company, who was so impressed that when John graduated Princeton magna cum laude in 1951, Morgan offered him a job.
Working directly under Morgan in an administrative role, John C. Bogle was promoted to assistant manager in 1955, which gave him much broader freedoms on what he could invest in, on behalf of investors.
Following on from what he’d written years previously in his thesis, John argued with his superiors at Wellington to stop focusing on a single fund and create a second one under his leadership.
Despite their skepticism – very few fund companies at the time had more than one fund – John was successfully able to convince them to let him establish this second fund. Against all expectations, this second fund, known as the Windsor Fund, was a resounding success.
Promoted several times thanks to the success of the Windsor Fund, John became president of the company in 1967 and replaced the retiring Walter L. Morgan as chairman and CEO in 1970.
One of his acts as president was to merge Wellington Management Company with Boston-based investment management firm Thorndike, Doran, Paine & Lewis in late 1967.
Initially profitable, disagreements between the partners soon soured the deal and cost the company $1 billion in assets, as rival fund managers attempted to one-up one another at the expense of their clients’ money, causing many of them to leave.
Seeing it as John’s failure to prevent this mess in the first place, John C. Bogle was fired in 1974.
Though crippling at the time, years later, John would lament that whilst the failed merger was the greatest mistake of his career that took him years to overcome, “without it, there would not have been a Vanguard”.
The Vanguard Group
Later Life
Death
Legacy
How You Can Follow John C. Bogle’s Investing Philosophy
What Can we Learn From John C. Bogle?
Give Back
Don’t Let The Naysayers Get You Down
Pass on Your Knowledge
Perhaps the second greatest investor of his generation (after Warren Buffett), John C. Bogle could’ve quite easily kept what he’d learned in his decades as a fund manager to himself, or just share it with his closest confidants at Vanguard.
And he’d have been entirely justified in doing that.
Yet John never really forgot his roots, and believed heavily in people’s right to education, and chose to write dozens of books
