Recent posts by Craig Stock
Craig Stock heads Vanguard's Corporate Marketing and Communications department, responsible for delivering investor information and education in Vanguard’s "plain talk" style.
Paul A. Samuelson, who died December 13 at age 94, was rightly remembered as a brilliant educator, as author of the best-selling economics textbook ever, and as the second recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Professor Samuelson, the Nobel committee wrote, “has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory.”
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It’s a question we hear from time to time on this blog, as well as through e-mails, letters, and phone calls: “Why does Vanguard advertise?”
It’s a fair question. And believe me, it’s a topic debated vigorously by Vanguard’s leadership team. Given the fact that the expense is ultimately borne by the shareholders in our funds, which in turn are the sole owners of Vanguard, one might well ask, in the words of one client—“Why spend some of my money to attract some other investor?”
One of the smartest people I know—a brilliant copy editor—used to shake her head as she read articles about bonds and the bond market.
“I think you have to be born with the bond gene to understand bonds,” she would mutter.
What set Mary to muttering, as I recall, was the fact that bond prices tend to move in the opposite direction of interest rates.
You probably know that Vanguard advocates periodic rebalancing as a way to manage risk in investment portfolios.
Our Investment Counseling & Research Group, overseen by my fellow blogger John Ameriks, has written a detailed white paper on rebalancing. John weighed in as part of a post discussing whether buy-and-hold investing is a dead idea. And we’ve written numerous other articles and blog posts on the topic of rebalancing.
For 35 years I’ve carried a quotation in my wallet. More precisely, I’ve moved the quotation, clipped from a now-defunct newspaper, from wallet to wallet to wallet over the decades.
The quotation is from Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers”:
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.”