Pimco co-chief investment officer Bill Gross may be the paragon for an active fund manager, but he's still impressed with Vanguard Group Founder Jack Bogle, the godfather of passive investing.

"I've always liked Jack Bogle, although I've never met him," Gross wrote in his December Investment Outlook.

"He's got a lot of investment common sense, recognizing decades ago that investment managers in composite couldn't outperform the market. In fact, their alpha [value added] would be negative after fees and transaction costs were factored in."

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In terms of offering the strongest performance for the least risk in almost all asset classes, "index funds and many ETFs [exchange-traded funds] have done a better job than almost all active managers primarily because of lower fees," Gross writes.

The "almost," of course, gives him room to promote Pimco. And Bogle himself had praise for the firm in a recent interview within Morningstar, lauding the "Pimco effect" that allows some of the firm's funds to outperform index funds.

Bogle called Gross a "great hero out there."

As Gross sees it, "there's actually a place for both of our firms and investment philosophies in this age of high finance.

"If Bogle's concept of indexing was metaphorically similar to finding a cure for the cancerous devastation of high fees, then perhaps Pimco's approach could be similar to mapping the investment genome and using it to produce consistently high alpha."

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