John ("Jack") Bogle, the man widely credited with inventing index founds - now a standard feature of the industry - and the founder of Vanguard, has died at the age of 89.

One of the great figures of the investment management industry, Vanguard Group founder John Bogle, has died at the age of 89. He is known as the "father of indexing".

Bogle pioneered the model of the index fund, once considered an oddity but now a mainstream feature of the wealth management industry. As a consequence, Vanguard is now one of the largest investment houses in the world, overseeing $4.9 trillion of assets as at the end of last year.

“Jack Bogle made an impact on not only the entire investment industry but, more importantly, on the lives of countless individuals saving for their futures or their children’s futures,” Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley, said. “He was a tremendously intelligent, driven, and talented visionary whose ideas completely changed the way we invest. We are honored to continue his legacy of giving every investor ‘a fair shake.’” 
          
Bogle, a resident of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, began his career in 1951 after graduating magna cum laude in economics from Princeton University. His senior thesis on mutual funds had caught the eye of fellow Princeton alumnus Walter L Morgan, who had founded Wellington Fund, the nation’s oldest balanced fund, in 1929 and was one of the deans of the mutual fund industry. Morgan hired the ambitious 22-year-old for his Philadelphia-based investment management firm, Wellington Management Company.

Bogle worked in several departments before becoming assistant to the president in 1955, the first in a series of executive positions he would hold at Wellington: 1962, administrative vice president; 1965, executive vice president; and 1967, president. Bogle became the driving force behind Wellington’s growth into a mutual fund family after he persuaded Morgan, in the late 1950s, to start an equity fund that would complement the Wellington Fund. Windsor Fund, a value-oriented equity fund, debuted in 1958.

In 1967, he led the merger of Wellington Management Company with the Boston investment firm Thorndike, Doran, Paine & Lewis (TDPL). Seven years later, a management dispute with the principals of TDPL led Bogle to form Vanguard in September 1974 to handle the administrative functions of Wellington’s funds, while TDPL/Wellington Management would retain the investment management and distribution duties. The Vanguard Group of Investment Companies commenced operations on May 1, 1975.

“Our challenge at the time,” Bogle recalled a decade later, “was to build, out of the ashes of major corporate conflict, a new and better way of running a mutual fund complex. The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.”

In 1976, Vanguard introduced the first index mutual fund - First Index Investment Trust - for individual investors. Now known as Vanguard 500 Index Fund, it has more than $441 billion in assets (the sister fund, Vanguard Institutional Index Fund, has $221.5 billion in assets). Today, index funds account for more than 70 per cent of Vanguard’s $4.9 trillion in assets under management.

In January 1996, Bogle passed the reins of Vanguard to his hand-picked successor, John J Brennan, who joined the company in 1982 as Bogle’s assistant. In December 1999, he stepped down from the Vanguard board of directors and created the Bogle Financial Markets Resource Center, a Vanguard-supported venture. Mr Bogle worked as the center’s president - analyzing issues affecting the financial markets, mutual funds, and investors through books, articles, and public speeches - until his death. He is the author of 12 books.

Born in New Jersey, he married Eve Sherrerd in 1956. They had six children. He also leaves 12 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.