John Bogle

John C. Bogle was the Founder of The Vanguard Group, Inc., and President of the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center. He created Vanguard in 1974 and served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer until 1996 and Senior Chairman until 2000. He had been associated with a predecessor company since 1951, immediately following his graduation from Princeton University, magna cum laude in Economics. He was a graduate of Blair Academy, Class of 1947.

Vanguard is the largest mutual fund organization in the world. Headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, Vanguard comprises approximately 170 mutual funds with current assets totaling more than $2 trillion. Vanguard 500 Index Fund, the largest fund in the group, was founded by Mr. Bogle in 1975. It was the first index mutual fund. The story of his life and career is told in John Bogle and the Vanguard Experiment: One Man’s Quest to Transform the Mutual Fund Industry, by Robert Slater (1996) and The House That Jack Built, by Lewis Braham (2011).

In 2004, TIME magazine named Mr. Bogle as one of the world’s 100 most powerful and influential people, and Institutional Investor presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1999, Fortune designated him as one of the investment industry’s four “Giants of the 20th Century.” In the same year, he received the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University for “distinguished achievement in the Nation’s service.” In 1997, he was named one of the “Financial Leaders of the 20th Century” in Leadership in Financial Services (Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997). In 1998, Mr. Bogle was presented the Award for Professional Excellence from the Association for Investment Management and Research (now the CFA Institute), and in 1999 he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Fixed Income Analysts Society, Inc.

Featuring this expert

John Bogle: How Wall Street Lost Sight of Ordinary Americans

Video | Jan 17, 2019

From tax loopholes to high-risk speculation, Vanguard’s founder reflects on the state of Wall Street and the change needed to make finance work for ordinary people.