I would like to congratulate our very own Charley Ellis for his selection as one of Money Magazine’s 2016 Champions of the Year! I have had the pleasure of serving alongside Charley on the Rebalance Investment Committee and I have seen firsthand his brilliance, his extraordinarily deep investment knowledge, and his passionate commitment to helping all Americans retire with more.
In his storied and decades long career, Charley has worked tirelessly to spread the word about the low-cost, high-quality alternative to active management. An avid index investing enthusiast, and one of the forefathers of the indexing movement; Charley has managed to marry his sharp financial skills with this noble endeavor. With the release of his latest book The Index Revolution, Charley certainly has cemented himself as one of retirement investing’s go-to gurus. I can think of no one more deserving of the title Money Magazine’s “Money Champion of 2016′′.
Read Money’s write-up on Charley, in full, below.
For investors, 2016 was the year of the index fund. Some $175 billion was yanked from actively managed funds, while $326 billion was stashed in passive ones. This shift came about in large part because of the ideas of investment consultant and author Charles Ellis—whose new book, The Index Revolution, sums up the case he’s been making for decades.
Back in 1975, Ellis wrote an article arguing that investors would come out ahead by simply avoiding mistakes rather than seeking to beat the market. Forty years of data have proved him to be prophetic.
Central to Ellis’s case is the huge impact of investment costs. “It’s easy to ignore a 1% fee if you’re earning 15% returns,” says Ellis. “But today you’re lucky to get 7%, which means a 1% fee takes nearly 15% of your returns.” In today’s world of low returns, that’s a message that has never been more urgent.
