📖John Bogle
Checklist Discipline
Use checklists to prevent investment oversights.
Use an investment checklist to ensure you don't skip critical steps. Aviation-style checklists prevent costly oversights in investment analysis.
🏠 Everyday Analogy
📖 Core Interpretation
John Bogle advocates a repeatable process: define criteria, execute consistently, and review decisions against evidence. Process quality drives outcome consistency.
💎 Key Insight:Checklists enforce discipline and prevent errors.
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❓ Why It Matters
Without process, there is no reliable feedback loop. Structured execution and review improve decision quality over time.
🎯 How to Practice
Run a decision loop of research, thesis, execution, and post-mortem; document assumptions and update playbooks with evidence, not hindsight bias.
⚠️ Common Pitfalls
Having opinions without execution criteria
Reviewing outcomes but not decisions
Abandoning rules during volatility spikes
📚 Case Studies
1
Emerging Markets Funds After 2003–2007 Boom (2008)
From 2003–2007, emerging markets equity funds (e.g., Templeton and Fidelity EM funds) vastly outpaced U.S. stock index funds. Their 30%+ annualized gains attracted heavy inflows, while U.S. broad-market index funds appeared comparatively sluggish and unexciting.
✨ Outcome:In 2008, emerging markets plunged more than U.S. stocks, and their subsequent decade-long returns lagged the S&P 500. Late-arriving investors who chased the prior outperformance fared poorly, reinforcing that sector and regional leaders often revert toward the long-run global equity mean.
2
1973–74 Bear Market and Balanced Funds (1973)
During the brutal 1973–74 bear market, U.S. stocks fell roughly 45%, while high‑quality bonds were roughly flat to slightly positive. Investors holding 60/40 balanced funds, such as Wellington Fund (founded 1929 and later run by Bogle’s firm), saw far smaller declines than all‑equity investors, enabling many to stay invested instead of capitulating at the bottom.
✨ Outcome:The episode showed that asset allocation—mixing stocks and bonds—can dramatically reduce drawdowns, influencing Bogle’s advocacy of balanced portfolios tailored to risk tolerance.
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