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I confess...

...that I haven't read any of John Bogle's books. But I have the majority of my investments at the mutual fund company he founded, Vanguard. (So does he.) And I liked this interview with him in The New York Times.

He is armed with statistics showing that a vast majority of investors — including most professional investment managers — should not even bother trying to pick individual stocks. They are just not very good at it, he says. Better to invest in the broad market through index funds with low costs, allowing the shareholders, and not the investment managers, to profit when times are good. [...]

Yet for simple, straightforward reasons, he says that this is a very good time to put money into stocks — not for short-term trades, mind you, but as part of a diversified portfolio that you hold for many years.

He goes on to recommend holding bonds as well as stocks, both through low-cost index funds (rather like what I have) and to make the overall % of bonds roughly equal to your age.

His own holdings are invested entirely in Vanguard funds, in what he says is “probably” a 75 percent bond, 25 percent stock allocation — roughly in keeping with his age-based formula.

“I don’t really know the exact allocation,” he said last week in another interview. “I don’t check the portfolio more than once a year. It had been 70-30 bond to stock, but the stock market has been so bad lately, and the bond market has been pretty good, so the markets have rebalanced the portfolio for me. Of course, like any investor over the last year, I wish the portfolio had been even more conservative, but so it goes.”