Looking for a Needle in a Haystack
You’ve heard the phrase, “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.” It conjures up images of frustration and often failure while looking for the one useful thing in the haystack, the needle. My good friend, the late Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, adapted that phrase to great effect. “Why look for the ‘needle in the haystack,’ just buy the whole haystack.” Jack thought owning the whole haystack (the stock market) via a broad-based index fund, such as an S&P 500 index fund with 500 stocks, freed investors from spending time, effort and money looking for hard-to-find great stocks, the needles, for their portfolios.
