John Bogle, Bogle Financial Markets Center (Bogle): Thank you very much, Jim. And welcome, all you webinar listeners. I presume there are a few Bogle-heads there and I send a special welcome to them.

It’s fun to be with you this morning. I thought I would begin by giving you a report on the status of index funds in mid-2009. I guess the main point I would like to begin with is that we now know what we really suspected, or strongly believed, 25 or 35 years ago when I started the first index fund—that indexing would change the world of investing.

I believe it is now clear that indexing has changed the world of investing in some very remarkable ways. First and most notably, I think we’ve had an odd convergence of indexing in two different areas. Active fund management has become much more like passive fund management—for example, active managers are often quantitative, working off matching indexes or having enhanced index funds or closet index funds. Or when you look at brokerage recommendations, you see they overweight relative to the index or underweight rather than buy or sell. The way we look at investing has been changed by standard indexing.

But even as that has happened, passive indexing has gotten a lot more like active fund management. That is, we use index funds for rapid trading in some very remarkable ways, which I will discuss this morning.

We can go to the first slide there and just take a look at what I will call a triumph of indexing. You see the growth of indexing just in the last 15 years from $24 billion to $914 billion on the equity fund side. Throw in roughly $150 billion of bond fund indexing and you are over $1 trillion—about $1.60 trillion in index money in a long-term stock and bond mutual fund industry that has $6 trillion of assets. So indexing itself now accounts for one-sixth of all the mutual fund assets; quite a remarkable thing.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |