The Vanguard Group

Vanguard is owned by its own funds, so profits return to fund shareholders as lower fees, and its largest index funds now charge a few basis points on roughly $10 trillion of assets. John Bogle founded it in 1975 after Wellington's board removed him, and he launched the first retail index fund the following year. A reader should know up front that the book-length literature is mostly about Bogle and the rise of indexing rather than about how Vanguard is run day to day, and that Bogle wrote a large share of it himself. Wigglesworth and Balchunas cover the index fund as an industry event, Charles Ellis gets closest to the firm and its post-Bogle management, and the Bogle titles set out the fee arithmetic he argued from for forty years.

8 books