Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And then related to what I was saying there, even more than the underperformance—you know, some might say non-performance—of the active management industry during the crisis, the crisis just completely burst whatever halo or status or bubble had emerged around Wall Street and fund managers for most of the investing public. A lot of people's views of Wall Street during the financial crisis changes from, "Hey, these are smart people who I should probably invest my money with," to "These people are charlatans at best and crooks at worst." You've got the bailouts, you've got the Occupy Wall Street movement. You've got Lehman Brothers, you've got all this stuff. Public sentiment turns against Wall Street and active management in not just a major way, but arguably a permanent way. And who is there as the hero of Main Street, the little guys, but Malvern, Pennsylvania-based Jack Bogle and Vanguard, which makes no profits, has no fees above costs, has no corporate owners, and has always been the champion of the average American. I mean, you could not draw up a better marketing event for Vanguard than the financial crisis. Yeah. And I think for a lot of people, they just decided to hang it up on thinking too hard about their finances. They thought, "Look, I thought I was clever for trusting this person's cool strategy. I thought they were clever. Turns out none of us were clever enough." And the easy button where nobody's making any promises about how much better they're going to do—I mean, Vanguard makes you no promises. It's, "Hey, you're going to get the market. " If you're interested in the market, it has historically performed well because it essentially captures the productivity growth and innovation of the world's most successful economy. In fact, since they started existing in 1975, it's done extraordinarily well, something like 11.6% compound annual growth rate if you reinvest dividends. That's a delightful average. If that's average, I'll take average. Right, right.…

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