Vanguard’s founder JACK BOGLE WARNS: Prepare For Two Massive 50% Market Declines In The Next Decade

JACK BOGLE WARNS: Prepare For Two Massive Market Declines In The Next Decade

Matthew Boesler | Apr. 1, 2013, 5:38 PM | 5,977 | 17

Jack Bogle is the founder and chairman of mutual-fund giant Vanguard Group and is widely credited for popularizing index funds, a staple for buy-and-hold investors. Today, he was on CNBC, and he had a bit of a startling prediction. CNBC anchor Scott Wapner put the question to Bogle: You say, ‘prepare for at least two declines of 25-30 percent, maybe even 50 percent, in the coming decade.’ For a buy-and-hold guy, that’s a little concerning, don’t you think?”

Bogle replied: 

Not at all. They come and go. The market goes up, and the market goes down. It’s never failed to recover from one of those 50 percent declines. I went through one in 1973-1974, I went through one in 2001, 2002, 2003; I went through another one 2008-2009. They’re kind of scary – often terrifying – but it’s typical. Why it doesn’t bother me is if you hang on through the cycle, that’s the only way to invest. Trying to guess when it’s going to go way up or way down is simply not a productive way to put your money to work. Bogle’s comments don’t represent any sort of shift in his philosophy – he remains as big a proponent of buy-and-hold investing as ever. Of course, if Bogle is right about two 50-percent declines in the next decade, it’s going to be a trying experience for the buy-and-hold crowd.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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