Jack Bogle, the legendary founder of Vanguard Group, has a colorful explanation of why individual investors can't replicate the success of investment icon Warren Buffett.
"Beethoven could tell you how to write a symphony but you can't write a symphony like Beethoven does,"
Bogle told the Financial Times.
"You can't copy, with any hope of success, a Beethoven or Buffett. You can copy Bogle at any moment of time. Just buy the damn index fund."
As you probably surmised, Bogle is an advocate of index funds — and so is Buffett by the way.
In his
annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders last March, Buffett wrote that most investors would do well to follow the instructions in his will.
Those instructions are to "put 10 percent of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90 percent in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard's.)," Buffett said.
As for assessments of Buffett, hedge fund star Cliff Asness, co-founder of AQR Capital, also offers an interesting one. "He identified what I would call good factors and what he would call good investing early," Asness told the Times.
"So many people talk about their investing, and then you run the numbers and find they are not quite doing that. I found it comforting and a compliment to him that Buffett has consistently followed what he talked about."
Meanwhile, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, the money managers Buffett has chosen to likely succeed him didn't enjoy such a hot performance last year,
Fortune reported.
Combs' stock portfolio slipped 0.3 percent before dividends, and Combs' climbed 6.7 percent, according to calculations by the magazine. Both fell short of the 11.4 percent gain registered by the S&P 500 Index.
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