Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle says stocks aren't necessarily getting ahead of themselves as the first day of trading pitched equities higher. He sees a healthy market ahead.

“Keep your emotions out of it if you can, and enjoy the fact that American capitalism is doing very well right now, thank you, at the moment,” Bogle told Fox Business.

“With a 2 percent dividend yield, and maybe 7 percent earnings growth, that would give you 9 percent total return on the market this year, and I would consider that a very satisfactory year,” Bogle said.

There’s always a chance that something bad will happen in the middle of the year, Bogle said, but “that’s probably reasonable expectations as I talk to you this afternoon.”

Bogle pointed out that, despite the run higher in Treasury yields, rising to nearly 3.25 percent from 2.25 percent, the return savers get remains dismal.

“For most Americans, savings yields on CDs and money market funds are just pathetic, so there’s still not a lot of very good places to hide,” he said.

Bogle warns against commodities and emerging-market stocks, for a few reasons.

A stock investment is based on dividends and earnings growth year after year, says the famed long-term investor. That simply isn't true about commodities like metals and oil, he said.

“On a commodity, there is no internal rate of return. Instead of being an investment, commodities are a rank speculation, with nothing to support them other than what you think somebody else will pay for them,” Bogle said.

Bogle says he can “understand the argument of a resource-short world,” yet he believes that investing in resources isn't for most.

“It’s an expectations market in commodities, rather than real market, so I say be very careful of commodities,” Bogle said.

Despite his warm words for equities now, Bogle doesn’t see a rush to U.S. stocks as investors bail out of bonds.

Instead, in his view, too many are headed to foreign stocks.

“There’s money still coming out pretty much of U.S. equities. A lot of it’s going into emerging-market equities, which is kind of frightening, because mutual-fund investors, bless their souls, are performance chasing,” Bogle said. “They’re looking back at what has done well in the past and thinking it will do well in the future.”

Remember, he said, “yesterday’s champion is tomorrow’s villain ... Reversion to the mean, we call it, and that happens with great frequency.”

Gold prices fell back after setting new records in recent days, falling more than 2 percent as investors moved into riskier assets, including stocks, reported Reuters.

Nevertheless, analysts said that the metal would likely recover as questions over the U.S. deficit and problems in Europe continue to raise doubts.

"The majority of factors for gold are very positive," Credit Suisse precious metals analyst Tom Kendall told the wire service.