Trillions: How a Band of Renegades Invented the Index Fund Part One
Jill on Money with Jill Schlesinger
Audacy
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2021
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
Fifty years ago, the Manhattan Project of money management was quietly assembled in the financial industry's backwaters, unified by the heretical idea that even many of the world's finest investors couldn't beat the market in the long run.
The motley crew of nerds, including economist wunderkind Gene Fama, humiliated industry executive Jack Bogle, bull-headed and computer-obsessive John McQuown, and avuncular former WWII submariner Nate Most, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Passive investing now accounts for more than $20 trillion, equal to the entire gross domestic product of the US, and is today a force reshaping markets, finance and even capitalism itself in myriad subtle but pivotal ways.
Yet even some fans of index funds and ETFs are growing perturbed that their swelling heft is destabilizing markets, wrecking the investment industry and leading to an unwelcome concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands.
In Trillions, Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth unveils the vivid secret history of an invention Wall Street wishes was never created, bringing to life the characters behind its birth, growth, and evolution into a world-conquering phenomenon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Jill on Money Podcast. It is October 16th. It's the weekend. And we are so happy |
| 0:10.5 | you are joining us. Today we are going to talk to somebody whose byline I've been reading |
| 0:16.3 | for a long time. His name is Robin Wigglesworth. He is the global finance correspondent of the |
| 0:23.1 | Financial Times. Robin has just written a new book that is so interesting. It is called Trillions, |
| 0:31.7 | how a band of Wall Street renegades invented the index fund and changed finance forever. Now you |
| 0:38.4 | guys know I love index funds. So going back into the history of how this started was so illuminating. |
| 0:45.6 | Robin who self describes himself as immensely nerdy makes this very very tangible. So here is |
| 0:54.4 | the first part of our interview with Robin Wigglesworth. I mean look you wrote a deep dive 300 page |
| 1:03.5 | book about index funds. You must be some sort of I don't know maybe you're you're a glutton or |
| 1:10.4 | maybe you just were up constantly because you were having children. What was going on that made |
| 1:16.0 | you write this book? Yeah well obviously I'm you know I'm a financial journalist so I'm immensely |
| 1:21.8 | nerdy anyway but for me you know it was something I'd written a lot about from the for the financial |
| 1:28.2 | times like how this was changing markets and it was one of those stories the more I dug into it |
| 1:33.1 | and the more I dug into the history of it the more I realized just how monumental this was and how |
| 1:38.8 | it's kind of arguably one the biggest least appreciated economic stories of our times because here |
| 1:44.9 | you have this fantastic invention by a bunch of these kind of nobodies or essentially why they're |
| 1:51.1 | hated by Wall Street that saved people hundreds of hundreds of billions of dollars. And what's so |
| 1:56.3 | fascinating is that I think people like me who come from the world of financial planning investment |
| 2:02.9 | management I think that many of us went through a transformation that some of the the characters |
| 2:09.1 | in your book went through which is you come out of a certain brand of say Wall Street and you say |
| 2:16.3 | well you know with enough research you should be able to outperform an index and we always compare |
| 2:22.8 | ourselves with the index and then you get to some moment in your life where you're like actually |
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