David Rosenthal

“Capital group manages three trillion in assets... the competitors were probably right to be terrified of this sort of communist act... But also sort of wrong because Capital Group, BlackRock, Fidelity — these are all giant profitable companies.”

“The only way that Jack and Vanguard can get around the distribution prohibition for this new fund, they figure out, is to do an IPO of it... doing a one-time event of an IPO of the fund did not count as distribution and marketing.”

“S&P, 'I don't know, gosh, should you be paying us? Should we be paying you? This is going to be great marketing for us.' They eventually land on Vanguard paying S&P $25,000 per year.”

“Ned Johnson at Fidelity would famously comment to the press about the launch of this fund... Deeply ironic because a giant amount of Fidelity's asset base today is composed of index funds, many of which are Vanguard index funds held within Fidelity.”

“Morgan had a crisis of confidence. He's not sure that he's going to be able to operate and be successful in this new go-go era... His direction to Bogle is, I want you to do whatever it takes to fix this firm.”

“He would eventually take over the American Can Company, you know, that had been co-founded by Jack's grandfather... Tsai would become the CEO of that. He would transform that into Primerica and then sell it to Sandy Weil and Jamie Dimon, and that would be part of the building block of Citigroup.”

“Management companies of investment firms have phenomenal operating leverage... Unfortunately, that works in both directions. So if your assets under management ever start to shrink, that goes away very quickly.”

“If you are able to pull this off and just own the average of the market, but do it at significantly lower fees than all of the other managers in the market, you will actually have top tier performance.”