Stay the Course: The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution

Bogle's late memoir covers the founding of Vanguard in 1974, the launch of the first retail index fund in 1976, the mutual ownership structure that made low fees permanent, and the firm's growth to more than five trillion dollars under management. It is organised partly chronologically and partly by fund, with chapters on the Wellington relationship, the bond funds, the money market funds and the international products.

The substantive argument is about structure. Bogle contends that Vanguard's mutual form, in which the funds own the management company and the management company operates at cost, is the only arrangement that reliably delivers low fees, because every other structure gives the manager a profit motive that conflicts with the investor. He documents the fee reductions over decades and argues they were possible only because there was no external owner to capture them.

The last section is a critique of what indexing became. Bogle objects to exchange-traded funds on the grounds that intraday tradability invites the behaviour that indexing was meant to prevent, and he raises the concentration problem, warning that a small number of index managers voting a majority of shares in every large company is a governance issue that will require a policy response. Those concerns are now mainstream. The book is repetitive, since Bogle covered this material in a dozen earlier books, and it is a self-account by the founder about his own firm, including his displacement from its leadership, so the internal conflicts are told from one side.

Founder and CEO, The Vanguard Group 1974-1996; creator of the first retail index mutual fund

He built the institution and wrote the primary-source case for low-cost indexing that every later index advocate builds on.

The Vanguard Group