Book Review – Little Book of Common Sense Investing

I recently took a trip to Chicago and was able to read “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns” by John C. Bogle on the plane rides round trip. Bogle is the founder of the Vanguard Group and essentially created Exchange Traded Funds that match market indexes for the masses. It was an easy read and may have been an over promotion of an investing strategy he created. However, the book does offer sound advice and he does do a good job explaining why his method is better. Even the Oracle himself believes in this method.

Here is a quick rundown:

• Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are designed to match the performance of Indexes and have very low fees.
• Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds have high fees that makes their managers more money than their investors.
• Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds do not beat the S&P 500 Index over time.

I personally have ETF’s as part of my Acorns account. You can read about how that works here: https://parttime-investing.com/2018/06/09/acorns/