Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
By pioneering index funds and a customer-owned corporate structure, Jack Bogle helped redirect enormous sums from Wall Street fees back to everyday retail investors.
Vanguard's mutual corporate structure ensures clients are the exclusive owners of the firm, completely eliminating the structural conflict between outside shareholders and fund investors.
Long-term investment returns are heavily eroded by compounding intermediary fees, making a low-cost passive indexing strategy structurally superior to high-fee active management in aggregate.
The index fund succeeds behaviorally because it encourages investors to buy and hold rather than incurring heavy transaction costs by constantly trading in reaction to market swings.