Emailed on January 18, 2019 in The Friday Forward

Retail investors lost one of their greatest allies this week.

John Clifton Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group and a crusader for investors’ rights for more than three decades, died from cancer in Bryn Mawr, Pa., on Wednesday at age 89.

“If all investors had heeded his ideas, they would be hundreds of billions of dollars better off than they are now,” Warren Buffett told The Wall Street Journal in 2009.

John Bogle, known as Jack, basically created index funds - one of the most popular options for institutional and individual investors alike. Throughout his career his strategy was to slash fees, which eventually lead to price wars throughout the investment product industry that shaped much of what we have today.

Vanguard is now the second-largest asset manager in the world, with $4.9 trillion in assets under management at the end of 2018.