Acknowledgments

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I have received incredibly wonderful support from the entire (three-person) staff of Bogle Financial Markets Research Center, the Vanguard-supported unit that began its formal activities at the beginning of 2000.

I want to express special thanks to Assistant to the President Kevin P. Laughlin, who joined me in 1999 and is among the longest-serving of the 13 assistants who have worked with me over the years, going all the way back to 1960. Kevin has done just about everything but actually write this book—researching subjects, developing data, checking sources, helping to edit the text, working with the publisher. He has done it not only with excellence but with a patience and equanimity that have to be seen to be believed.

Emily Snyder, my executive assistant for 17 years now (and with 22 years of service on the Vanguard crew), has also been an enormous help, with extraordinary skill, steadfast finesse, and unfailing good humor. While I think she winced when I told her that, yes, I’d be writing my sixth book (and only a few short months after the publication of number five, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism), she has turned my scrawled writing on piles of legal pages into a beautifully rendered typescript, and she patiently carried me through the usual eight or so edits that I can’t help myself from doing—all in the pursuit of a clear, accurate, logical, and reader-friendly text.

While Sara Hoffman is new to our little group, she, too, did her share of endless typing and retyping, adjusting the rhythm of my writing to the frantic pace of our activity, also with skill, patience, and good humor.

I should note that I take full responsibility for the strong opinions expressed in this Little Book. These opinions do not necessarily represent the opinions of the present management of Vanguard. I remain deeply dedicated to Vanguard and its crew members, and continue to “press on, regardless” in the furtherance of the values that I invested in the firm when I founded it in 1974, and during the 25 years in which I served as chief executive, then chairman, and then senior chairman.