The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

Quick and solid read. A lot of these ideas weren't new to me, but I did take a lot of notes throughout. It's clear that Bogle is heavily in favor of index fund investing. I thought A Random Walk Down Wall Street laid out a more evidence-based case for this, but for a quick common-sense read this is a good one. Bogle's discussion of the impact of speculation on the market was very interesting. As a younger investor I see a clear trend towards growth stocks instead of value (dividend-paying) stocks and I think it's yet to be seen whether this will stick around in my lifetime. This discussion made me consider reversion to the mean and whether I should add more dividends to my portfolio.

While the book by the late John Bogle is overly verbose and uses your typical fuzzy financial lingo, it really imprinted upon me how important the compounding effect is of not just your investments' returns, but especially the costs. Low-cost index funds (whether mutual funds or ETFs) bought and kept for long time horizons outcompete >90% of all actively managed funds.