Hooray for index funds—just don’t call them passive

Aug 11th 2026|4 min read

The launch of the Vanguard First Index Investment Trust, 50 years ago this month, could have gone better. Jack Bogle, Vanguard’s founder, called it “an abject failure”. He had hoped to raise somewhere between $50m and $150m, but got only a little over $11m ($65m today). As the first fund aiming to do no more than track a stock-market index—America’s S&P 500—that was available to individual investors, it nevertheless raised hackles. “One conclusion, usually expressed with considerable feeling, is that index funds are a ‘cop-out’ and a fad that will soon disappear,” sniffed an article in the Financial Analysts Journal, published later the same year.