📖John Bogle
Behavioral Bias Awareness
Know your behavioral biases to avoid them.
Know the common behavioral biases that trap investors: anchoring, confirmation bias, loss aversion, and herding. Awareness is the first step to prevention.
🏠 Everyday Analogy
📖 Core Interpretation
John Bogle treats survival as the first objective. Limiting permanent capital loss, controlling leverage, and avoiding single-point failure are prerequisites for long-term compounding.
💎 Key Insight：Awareness of biases is the first defense against them.
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❓ Why It Matters
A single large drawdown can erase years of progress. Risk control is not timidity; it is the operating system that keeps compounding alive.
🎯 How to Practice
Define downside scenarios before entry, cap position size, avoid fragile leverage, and maintain liquidity so mistakes remain survivable.
⚠️ Common Pitfalls
Equating volatility with all forms of risk
Oversized positions without an exit plan
Using leverage to compensate for uncertainty
📚 Case Studies
1
Staying Invested Through the Global Financial Crisis (2008)
In 2008–2009, the S&P 500 fell over 50% from its 2007 high. Terrified investors sold en masse, many abandoning stock funds near the bottom in early 2009. Bogle publicly urged investors to hold their diversified index funds and avoid trying to time the rebound.
✨ Outcome：From the March 2009 low through the next decade, the S&P 500 returned several hundred percent. Investors who stayed the course fully participated in the recovery, while those who sold often re‑entered late, locking in losses and missing substantial gains.
2
Vanguard Index Fund vs. Market Timers (1976)
In 1976, John Bogle launched the First Index Investment Trust (later Vanguard 500 Index Fund). It was mocked as “Bogle’s folly” in an era dominated by star stock‑pickers and market timers. Over the next decades, many active funds and newsletter gurus tried to move in and out of stocks based on forecasts of recessions, inflation scares, crashes, and recoveries.
✨ Outcome：Despite multiple crashes (1987, 2000–02, 2008–09), the low‑cost S&P 500 index fund that simply stayed invested outperformed the vast majority of active managers and timers, illustrating that persistent time in the market beat attempts to time it.
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