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Wiandt: How do you see the Barclays-Black Rock merger affecting the investment landscape? What do you view as the implications of that merger?
Bogle: Well, that’s a good question. I have a couple of observations. First, they paid a pretty good-sized price. I think since Barclays kept 20% of the company, the price comes out to be something like $17 billion or $18 billion. That’s a lot of money to pay for a fairly low-margin business. Second, ultimately, I think they are going to have to reduce the cost of the funds, which will make it less attractive as an investment—because they are just a very high-cost outfit, compared to the low-cost provider, which is always Vanguard.
iShares has an average expense ratio of 41 basis points. And those are the ETFs run by Barclays. Vanguard has an average expense ratio in its ETFs of 15 basis points. Eventually the low cost wins. That’s all there is to it. So they are going to have to worry about whether they can be able to be competitive with high prices—which can be providing them with a lot of revenues and maybe a lot of money to do marketing and a lot of money to create one new index-based ETF after another, which they seem to be doing.
I think it is going to be a hard business then to build market share. And since they are around a 50% market share now, in my experience, most firms, when they get to 50% market shares, find it much more likely for that market share to shrink than to grow.
There is also another kind of a subtle thing, and I don’t mean to be unkind at all to BlackRock, but they have a real problem with active management. There is no question they must be interested in index funds because they are indexed and not actively managed. We took a look at 100 funds. They have 100 closed-end bond funds and we took a look at them last year, and 99 of them—you know, the bond market went up 5%—99 of them had negative returns. Fifty-four of them had negative returns of over 20%, including 24 of the Black-Rock-managed bond funds that had negative returns of 30%–60% last year.
I mean you’ve got to be struggling with the business when active management is producing those kinds of returns on their bond funds, their area of expertise. So I wish them well. I don’t particularly want to be in a position of criticizing them. But with their record last year, I’m sure they are every bit as disappointed and surprised as I am. I would think, to them, indexing looks like a pretty darn good business.
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