The document outlines a successful investing strategy of buying a low-cost index fund and holding it forever. It explains that most actively managed mutual funds fail to beat the market after fees, which average 2.5% annually. Over long periods of time, these costs overwhelm returns and compound, so that an initial $100,000 investment grows to only $1,450,400 in 50 years at a net 5.5% return in a mutual fund, versus $4,690,000 at an 8% gross market return in a low-cost index fund. Therefore, the best strategy is to keep costs low by investing in broad-based index funds.

1. Successful Investing Strategy

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3. SUCCESSFUL INVESTING is all about common sense…….

4. Simple arithmetic suggests, and history confirms, that the winning strategy is to own all of the nation's publicly held businesses at very low cost

5. The best way to implement this strategy is indeed simple : Buying a fund that holds this market portfolio, and holding it forever. Such a fund is called an index fund .

6. The relentless rules of humble arithmetic As investors, all of us as a group earn the stock market's return

7. The relentless rules of humble arithmetic As a group we are average!

8. The relentless rules of humble arithmetic Each extra return that one of us earns means that another of our fellow investors suffers a return shortfall of precisely the same dimension.

9. Before the deduction of the costs of investing, beating the stock market is a zero-sum game

10. The costs of playing the investment game both reduce the gains of the winners and increases the losses of the losers

11. So who wins?

12. You know who wins…..

13. The man in the middle (actually, the men and women in the middle, the brokers, the investment bankers, the money managers, the marketers, the lawyers) is the only sure winner in the game of investing.

14. Our financial croupiers always win……

15. After the deduction of the costs of investing, beating the stock market is a loser's game

16. “ The investment business is a giant scam . Most people think they can find managers who can outperform, but most people are wrong. I will say that 85 to 90 percent of managers fail to match their benchmarks. Because managers have fees and incur transaction costs, you know that in the value.” Jack R. Meyer, former president of Harvard Management Company, the remarkably successful wizard who tripled the Harvard endowment fund from $8 billion to $27 billion .

17. All investors as a group must necessarily earn precisely the market return, but only before the costs of investing are deducted

18. In a market that returns 10 percent, we investors together earn a gross return of 10 percent. But after we pay our financial intermediaries, we pocket only what remains. (And we pay them whether our returns are positive or negative!)

19. Let's assume the stock market generates a total return averaging 8 percent per year over a half century

20. Now let's assume that the costs of the average mutual fund continue at their present rate of at least 2.5 percent per year . Result: a net annual return of just 5.5 percent for the average fund.

21. $ 100,000,- $ 100,000,- Invested for 50 years 8 % per year 5,5 % per year Annual gain (5,5%  8 % – 2,5 %; 2,5 % = the costs of the average mutual fund ) = = ? ?

22. The value of the $100,000 investment in 50 years Annual Gain 8 % Annual Gain 5,5% $ 4,690,000,- $ 1,450,400,-

23. Where did that $ 3,230,600 go? $ 4,690,000 - $ 1,450,400 = $ 3,230,600

24. What you see here is that over the long term, the miracle of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs

25. Where returns are concerned, time is your friend. But where costs are concerned, time is your enemy .

26. So what to do now?

27. You know the answer

28. Source of Reference: John Bogle , Little Book of Common Sense Investing , John Wiley & Sons