How to use Vanguard s Principles for Investing Success Jason Method: If you re an investor, what does success look like? Does it mean becoming wealthy, or does it mean securing a reasonable retirement, putting children through college, or buying that first home? Whatever your definition, how does an investor become successful? Meet the speaker Hello, I m Jason Method, and welcome to Vanguard s Investment Commentary podcast series. In this month s episode, which we re taping on May 30, 2017, we re going to discuss Vanguard s Principles for Investing Success, which can be found on our website. With us today is Andy Clarke of the Vanguard Investment Strategy Group and author of Wealth of Experience: Real Investors on What Works and What Doesn t. Andy is here to explain how everyone from a beginning investor to the most sophisticated advisor can succeed in investing. Hi, Andy, and thanks for joining us. Andy Clarke Vanguard Investment Strategy Group Andy Clarke: Sure, thanks, Jason. Jason Method: So tell us, what are the principles, and how long have they been around? Andy Clarke: Vanguard s Principles for Investing Success are our philosophy about what it takes to succeed as an investor. And there are four principles. The first is goals, create clear, appropriate investment goals. The second is balance, develop a suitable [asset] allocation using broadly diversified funds. The third is cost, minimize cost. And the fourth is discipline, maintain perspective and long-term discipline. We first published these principles in 2013, but they ve been around in some form since Vanguard opened its doors in 1975. And you can actually trace them back even farther to Vanguard Wellington Fund, which was founded in 1929. Vanguard Wellington Fund was the nation s first balanced fund, and it exemplifies, obviously, balance but also discipline. So it maintains a portfolio of stocks and bonds, and it s had the discipline to execute this strategy for almost a century of different markets. Jason Method: Why would these principles be important today? Andy Clarke: Well, while they re always important, they re timeless, I think what changes is how you apply them to the current environment. So today we re in the middle of a stock bull market and conversations about balance, for example, are about remembering why you have bonds in your portfolio. Stocks are returning double digits; bonds are returning about 2%. Why would you want to hold bonds? Well, we have to remember that bonds are there to play a role in the portfolio. They can cushion the portfolio against the stock market s occasional and inevitable downturns. If you go back to 2008, 2009, the financial crisis, the principle is the same, but the conversation is very different. Back then, the conversation was about sticking with an allocation to stocks even though stock prices were tumbling.
Jason Method: These principles sound pretty intuitive, but there is more to them. Let s discuss each one briefly. What does it mean to have investment goals? Andy Clarke: Well, a goal is pretty much just what it sounds like. A goal is what you hope to accomplish with your investing, what you hope to accomplish with your investment portfolio. So for individuals, common goals include helping to finance a child s education or, for all of us, saving for retirement. Jason Method: Let s talk about retirement, Andy. That s a big one, as you mentioned, for really everyone. The first step in there seems to be how to figure out how much you re going to need, right? And that s tough, thinking so many years ahead. How do you estimate that? Andy Clarke: Yeah. You re right, retirement can be challenging. I mean some goals, like education, are relatively straightforward. You know what tuition is today. It s easy enough to estimate what it ll be by the time your child is ready for college, but retirement can be a lot more complex. If we re 20, 25 years from retirement, we re not really sure what we ll need. So the best approach, and it s a good approach, is just to start with a ballpark estimate. I ll give you a simple example of how you might do this on your own, but this is an area where advice can be especially helpful in helping you think through the different steps you ll need to take to the kind of lifestyle you want in retirement. So let s say you estimate you ll need $65,000 a year in retirement. You check the Social Security website, get a sense that you ll probably get $25,000 a year from Social Security, maybe you have $10,000 from rental income or a guaranteed income source such as a pension, and you realize that you ll need to generate another $30,000 from your investment portfolio. How much do you think you ll need to generate that amount of income each year in retirement? I d use the 4% rule just to get you in the ballpark. I d divide 30,000 by 4% and come up with an estimated portfolio target of $750,000. Jason Method: Okay, and the 4% rule is meaning you intend to take 4% of your portfolio out every year to pay for expenses. Andy Clarke: Right, that s right. You take 4% of the initial portfolio s value out and then adjust that amount for inflation every year. And it s a simple rule of thumb that historically, at least, has been a reliable means of figuring out how much you can withdraw while limiting the risk of running out of money during retirement. Jason Method: Aren t there a lot of other theories about how much you can withdraw in retirement? Andy Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, this is an active area of financial planning research at Vanguard and throughout the industry. And, you re right, it can be very complex. And, again, here s where a skilled, trusted advisor can be very helpful. There are tax implications, different trade-offs that might not be immediately apparent. So the 4% is good for coming up with a ballpark figure, but you can probably refine that estimate and maybe get a more useful picture of the different strategies you could use. Jason Method: Let s talk about the next principle, balance. Balance sounds easy, but let s be honest, many people are afraid of the stock market. We still remember the global financial crisis and how that hurt so many folks. Some people still don t want to go back in. Tell us about the need for balance and what that means. Andy Clarke: Yeah, the big picture idea with balance is that you want to combine different assets that behave differently in different market environments. So you mentioned that people are scared of the stock market. That s sometimes the case. Sometimes they re not
scared enough. And balance is about reminding ourselves that we need to have some balance between growth-oriented assets, stocks, and assets that can provide some cushion against the downturns, bonds. And you re inevitably going to be holding something in your portfolio that makes you uncomfortable, but I like a quote from the investment researcher Peter Bernstein, who said that if you re not holding something that makes you uncomfortable, you re not really diversified. Jason Method: If you re an investor and you re trying to figure this out, you re trying to be balanced, it can be daunting to try and pick from so many different options that are out there these days with however many thousand mutual funds and ETFs. Is there a way to sort through all that and achieve the balance that you think you need? Andy Clarke: I don t think it needs to be that complex. Here s a simple solution. One thing you can do is look at the target-date funds that are in so many 401(k) plans, and that s balance and diversification in practice. So target-date funds, as you know, are targeted to investors with a certain expected retirement date. So you could look at a balanced fund, find the target date that is relevant to you, and then look at what that portfolio s mix of stocks, bonds, and other assets is. And that gives you a good picture of how you should be thinking about balancing a portfolio. Jason Method: Is there more to asset allocation than just allocating between stocks and bonds? Andy Clarke: Well, stocks and bonds is the big one, but I think, you re right, it is important to emphasize that when we talk about stocks, we re not talking about just, say, large-cap U.S. stocks the S&P 500 index fund, for example. We re talking about diversifying broadly across the stock market big stocks, small stocks, U.S. stocks, international stocks and we re talking about the same broad diversification across the bond market government bonds, corporate bonds, international bonds. Jason Method: If an investor has a balanced allocation, say the common one is 60% stocks and 40% bonds, what kind of return can they expect? I mean when you talk about coming up with goals, you have to plug in a number, right, that says, Hey, I m going to get this return so I get that end result. But what s a reasonable expectation? Andy Clarke: Well, we can t know, but my go-to resource for this question is Vanguard s Economic and Investment Outlook, and you can find that on our website. And in this outlook, we project a range of likely returns or possible returns over the next decade. And you can look at these returns in a bell curve. And in the middle is what we call the central tendency. That s where we think returns are most likely to fall. They could be much higher; they could be at the tails of the bell curve; they could be much lower. But when we look at these central tendencies for a balanced fund, what we see over the next ten years is a real return that s an inflation-adjusted return of roughly 3% to 5%, and then a nominal return that s without the inflation adjustment of something like 5% to 7%. So that s the sort of neighborhood we re talking about when we re trying to plug in a number. Jason Method: Now, we ve come to the principle of cost, that is, the need to keep costs low. The principles say that costs are forever, like diamonds. What does that mean? Andy Clarke: Well, not as attractive as diamonds, but I guess equally permanent. Well, investment returns come and go. Investment returns can be very high one year, very low the next, but costs are a constant. They re an anchor on your portfolio. They re pulling down the
returns of your portfolio whether the financial markets are rallying or collapsing. So what you can do to maximize your share of whatever the market s return is to minimize the investment management costs you re paying. Jason Method: But don t you get what you pay for sometimes? I mean, should an investor only evaluate products just based on which one is the lowest cost? Andy Clarke: That s the perverse thing about investing. In most economic decisions, you re right, we do get what we pay for. If you go to an expensive five-star restaurant, you re going to get a better meal than you will at the beach hot dog stand. But in investment management, this balance between cost and value is turned on its head. Jason Method: Certainly Vanguard research, and other research, has found that lower costs allow you to keep more of any returns you may earn. But is there something worth paying for in investment management? Andy Clarke: Yeah, well, of course. I mean, if you think about financial advice, where the decisions can be so complex and it s much more than investment management. It s financial planning strategies, estate planning, tax planning those are services that can be well worth paying for. Jason Method: That brings us to the final principle, which is discipline. You, as an avid tennis player, know something about that. Andy Clarke: I think I know where you re going with the tennis question, but that s really just a specific instance of discipline, so let me talk about the big picture first. Discipline in our principles is about remaining committed to your plan and resisting the impulse to make changes to your plan in the face of these powerful emotions we all feel. And that can be very challenging. I mean, we all look at the headlines, and we ll see stories about maybe a particular group of stocks or strategies that are delivering exceptional returns, and we feel the impulse to chase those returns. Or maybe we turn on the TV and we see some smart, persuasive analyst painting a very bleak picture of the future. We get scared and think, it s time to pull all my money out of the market. Discipline is about trying to resist those impulses. Now you mentioned tennis, and I think you re referring to a famous essay by Charley Ellis called Winning the Loser s Game. And Ellis drew this interesting analogy between tennis and investment management. So this is the 1970s, and he was looking at professional tennis players like Björn Borg, Chris Evert, John McEnroe, with the crazy hair and the shorts up to here. And when he looked at the pros, he saw that they were playing a winner s game. They won by serving aces, hitting unreturnable shots. But when Ellis looked at the recreational game, he didn t see people serving aces or cracking these atomic forehands. He saw them dumping the ball in the net or hitting the ball against the fence. In the recreational game, he saw people winning by not losing. And he saw a parallel between this recreational tennis game and professional investment management. Professional investment management had become so competitive that if you tried to outperform by making aggressive purchases and sales or making aggressive changes to your asset allocation, you were more likely to make a mistake and lose. So his recommendation was: Don t play that game. Simply minimize your mistakes, passively accept the market s returns, and you ll more likely be a winner.
Now Ellis s essay was about index investing, but I think it has application to this principle of discipline too. And the key point is to minimize mistakes. Once you ve developed a sensible investment plan, you want to keep your portfolio in play, you want to save aggressively, you want to minimize mistakes such as reacting emotionally to what s happening in the market, and keep your focus on the long term. And as we demonstrate in the principles, this strategy has proven a key to investment success over decades. Jason Method: I want to bring up one more thing, and you just mentioned it, and that is that point about saving more. In your book, you cited an academic study of investors that found that some who had been in the lowest 10% of income for their entire careers had sizable retirement savings while some people who had been in the highest income tax brackets had nothing for retirement. Tell us more about what that means. Andy Clarke: Well, that study was an interesting example of something we ve probably all heard before, which is it s not what you earn; it s what you keep. And these researchers identified a group of people who earned very little but had good, disciplined saving strategies throughout their working years, and they were able to accumulate sizable portfolios and finance ambitious goals such as retirement. The study also looked at high earners who didn t have those savings habits. And as much potential as they had to accumulate large portfolios, they didn t have the sort of critical savings discipline to get there. Jason Method: That pretty much covers it. Thanks for joining us, Andy. Andy Clarke: Sure. Thanks, Jason. Jason Method: Words of wisdom goals, balance, cost, and discipline and save more if you can. Thanks for joining us for this Vanguard Investment Commentary podcast. To learn more about Vanguard s Principles of Investing Success, check out our website. And be sure to check back with us each month for more insights into the markets and investing. Remember, you can always follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. All investments are subject to risk, including the possible loss of the money you invest. Be aware that fluctuations in the financial markets and other factors may cause declines in the value of your account. There is no guarantee that any particular asset allocation or mix of funds will meet your investment objectives or provide you with a given level of income. The information presented in this podcast is intended for educational purposes only and does not take into consideration your personal circumstances or other factors that may be important in making investment decisions. For more information about Vanguard funds and Vanguard ETF Shares, visit advisors.vanguard. com or call 800-997-2798 to obtain a prospectus or, if available, a summary prospectus. Investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and other important information about a fund are contained in the prospectus; read and carefully consider it before investing. Investments in target-date funds are subject to the risks of their underlying funds. The year in the fund name refers to the approximate year (the target date) when an investor in the fund would retire and leave the workforce. The fund will gradually shift its emphasis from more aggressive investments to more conservative ones based on its target date. An investment in target-date funds is not guaranteed at any time, including on or after the target date. Diversification does not ensure a profit or protect against a loss. You may access and download this podcast only for your personal and noncommercial use. You may not use it in any other manner or for any other purpose without Vanguard s written permission. Vanguard Financial Advisor Services P.O. Box 2900 Valley Forge, PA 19482-2900 2017 The Vanguard Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Vanguard Marketing Corporation, Distributor. FA747306 062017