S_Volpe

Brazilian Jiujitsu Black Belt. 🥇/🥈/🥉

[NASA @NASA]

Acquisition of signal confirmed for our @NASARoman telescope. We have spacecraft separation, and a last look at Roman, now flying on its own. https://t.co/ZKTzQCAGxC

[S_Volpe @SVolpe941]

Amazing!

[Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson]

In Case You Missed It: This morning's launch of @NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
[7:26am ET, August 30, 2026].

Will arrive at Sun-Earth L2 in Early December, to discover Exoplanets and observe the effects of Dark Matter & Dark Energy on the Universe.

[Brian Hughes @brianhughes]

Today's launch as seen from a chopper.

[NASA @NASA]

The Falcon Heavy rocket’s side boosters return to Earth, coming in for a targeted landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

[S_Volpe @SVolpe941]

Tech backlash reaches fever pitch as AI angst collides with social media fears https://t.co/ogMRgVvOmX

The debate continues.

[National Air and Space Museum @airandspace]

Tomorrow, NASA will launch its new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

But who is it named for? Nancy Grace Roman was NASA's first Chief of Astronomy and was known as the "Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope." Learn more on the blog: https://t.co/hvF8QQ3WT5

[S_Volpe @SVolpe941]

How Dance Music Has Evolved: EDM Evolution Compilation (1990–2026) https://t.co/qqnDAoXoo9 via @YouTube

[Mike Beauvais @MikeBeauvais]

That dude was running fake routes on the beach in a 49ers helmet to scam women while the real Niners owner was at a trailer park in Ohio trying to pick up a prostitute for $140.

[S_Volpe @SVolpe941]

Crushed it!

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Tim Cook steps down as Apple, $AAPL, CEO on August 31 after taking the company from $350 billion to over $4 trillion.

[Dailyscienceinfo @NatureScienceA1]

Watching the total eclipse in Ibiza was one of the most awe-inspiring moments I think I've ever witnessed! Mind blown!

[S_Volpe @SVolpe941]

Old school.

[Vintage Las Vegas @summacorp]

Fremont Street, August 29, 1972

[NASA's Kennedy Space Center @NASAKennedy]

Roman is ready for liftoff tomorrow at 7:26 a.m. EDT!

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope stands vertical at Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

[Nick Gerli @nickgerli1]

A major housing headwind is about to hit.

And that's the Baby Boomer exodus from the U.S. Housing Market.

In the next decade, the share of U.S. population above 75 will skyrocket.

Meaning Baby Boomer owners who fueled the housing market over the last 20 years will turn into sellers they age out.

And Gen X, the next generation in line to buy up those homes, won't be able to absorb it. As they are 20% smaller in population than the Baby Boomers.

The result is that by 2037, there will be more 75+ aged Americans than 55-64 aged Americans. Which will be a first in modern U.S. History.

This will lead to lower homebuyer demand, more supply, and lower prices in retirement destinations.

Especially across Florida and Arizona.

To see how this demographic data for your area, check https://t.co/zlKe2138Ij.

[Bob Pisani @BobPisani]

It’s the 50th anniversary of an investment idea that changed the world.

Fifty years ago, on August 31, 1976, @Vanguard_Group Chairman and CEO John C. Bogle launched a new mutual fund, the First Index Investment Trust, now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

The purpose of the fund was to track the S&P 500.

It was based on a simple premise: instead of trying to beat the market, investors should own the market.

That simple idea would forever change the investing world.

The fund opened with little fanfare, and almost no support from Wall Street. Bogle had hoped to raise $50-$150 million to launch the fund. He raised only a little more than $11 million, “an abject failure,” as he later called it.

It had little support for a simple reason: Wall Street hated the idea.

Financial advisors had been selling their services for decades on one central idea: let us help you beat the market.

But by 1976, there was growing evidence that the vast majority of Wall Street advisors could not beat the markets.

Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson had already suggested that investors would benefit from the creation of a low-cost fund that would track the market. Princeton Professor Burton Malkiel also called for the creation of an index fund in his 1973 book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

The key was to find a way to provide diversification at low cost.

A simple idea: own the market at a low cost

In a 1997 introduction for an article on the indexing revolution, Bogle outlined, in a few paragraphs, the basic idea of index investing. The first concept was staying with the market and accepting market returns: “investors as a group cannot outperform the market, because they are the market,” he said.

The second concept was to keep costs low. Bogle and others recognized that even the tiny fraction of active managers that beat the indexes underperformed because the fees they were charging destroyed any alpha (outperformance) that they had generated. Those fees included operating expenses, advisory fees, and portfolio transaction costs.

Bogle’s fund, however, paid no advisory fees and limited portfolio turnover. An initial sales load for the fund was quickly dropped.

All of this kept costs down.

Back in 1976, it was not unusual for the all-in costs of a mutual fund, including management fees, expense ratio, and sales loads, to be in the 1.5%-2.0% range (150 to 200 basis points).

While the fees have changed over the decades, the trend has been down, and down dramatically.

Today, you can own the Vanguard 500 Index Fund ETF (VOO) for three basis points (0.03%), as well as most other S&P 500 ETF index funds, including the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV).

Indexing: a victim of its own success

Since then, index investing has increasingly come under attack by active managers, who, 50 years later, still resent the loss of fee income that passive investments have taken from them.

The most recent attacks include assertions that market-cap weighted indexes have become too concentrated, that it makes the biggest stocks even bigger, that index investors inhibit price discovery, or that index funds make the markets more volatile.

Some of these complaints, such as concentration risk, are legitimate issues, while others smell of desperation, the concerns of an industry that fears it cannot compete against three basis point ETFs and cannot justify significantly higher fees.

What’s the role for active management?

Active management is by no means dead. Indeed, the first half of 2026 saw a record $1 trillion in inflows into ETFs, of which $350 billion was into actively managed funds, also a record, according to Fidelity.

Much of these active inflows are due to investors seek to buy protection against a downturn in the markets, or generate income by selling calls against indexes like the S&P 500. These are significant new products for active management, and while we can debate about the cost of providing these products, they have struck a nerve with a part of the investing public.

But there are plenty of active managers today that engage in fundamental stock picking, or pick stocks by sector, themes or factors (size, value vs. growth, momentum, quality, etc.).

The issue for active managers, particularly stock pickers, is to pick areas of the market where they might outperform, and do it a reasonable price.

Jack Bogle himself was never against active management. Indeed, he was instrumental in the creation of several actively managed funds at Vanguard.

He was against high-priced active management.

Active management in stock picking, particularly large-cap stock picking, has become very difficult because the market is extremely efficient and is mostly dominated by professional investors that have little informational advantage.

Rather than attacking index investing, active managers should mine areas of the investment world that are inefficient.

There are plenty of inefficient nooks and crannies in the investment world: in equities, there are micro-cap and small-cap stocks, as well as emerging market and frontier markets. There are millions of bonds that trade in the U.S. alone, particularly in the muni market.

Indeed, there is good evidence that many actively managed bond funds outperform passively managed bond funds.

The central message of the index revolution

None of this debate should detract from the central message: that index investing has allowed investors to stay invested in the market at far lower expense than paying high-priced active management. Vanguard estimates that investors have saved approximately $570 billion since 2000 in the form of lower expense ratios for index fund investors.

More important is the wealth creation of staying consistently invested. Vanguard estimates that $10,000 invested in what is now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in 1976 would now be worth $2 million.

Bogle never tired of spreading the indexing gospel

In the summer of 1997, just as I was assuming the job of On-Air Stocks Editor for CNBC (I had been Real Estate Correspondent from 1990-1996), I called Bogle and asked if I could chat with him regularly.

It did not start off well.

“I’m not very happy with your television station, Mr. Pisani,” was the first words out of his mouth.

I thought it was quaint, calling CNBC a “television station” (it is a cable television network).

We were in the habit of having “superstar” investors like Bill Miller from Legg Mason, Bill Gross from Pimco, or Jim Rogers on the air on a regular basis. Bogle launched into a lecture, insisting these “superstars” were very rare, that most pundits never outperformed their benchmarks, and that CNBC was spending far too much time promoting a small group of pundits and not enough time on long-term buy-and-hold investing principles, particularly the power of owning index funds, which of course included the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

Still, at the end of the conversation he gave me his direct line, told me I could call him with questions, and also gave me the phone number of Gus Sauter, who was running Vanguard’s equity index funds and would prove to be a key player in the index revolution.

That began a relationship with Bogle (and Sauter) that continued until Bogle’s passing in 2019.

Jack Bogle was fond of saying, “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack! Just buy the haystack!”

Fifty years later, that vision of staying invested and owning the market at the lowest cost remains as valid as ever.

https://t.co/sdWb5S9KXN

[S_Volpe @SVolpe941]

Great shot.

[The Astronomy Guy @astrooalert]

Red Moon over Pyramids of Giza 😮

[S_Volpe @SVolpe941]

MP took the vitamins this morning.

[Happy Punch @HappyPunch]

Mike Perry was PISSED facing off with his new opponent for the first time 😳

“You shouldn’t have came here! I f*cking worked so hard for this sh*t and that p*ssy Dillon Danis ain’t come, so I gotta f*cking knock you out!”

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Trump reveals NASA is developing a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft for a Mars mission in 2028.

[MMA History Today @MMAHistoryToday]

Aug28.2005

21 years ago today,

23 year old Mauricio "Shogun" Rua won the PRIDE Middleweight Grand Prix

[Wise Michael Jordan @itsMichaelJ]

Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins playing street ball together is already cool enough. Doing it underneath the Gateway Arch makes it legendary.

[John Watches Horror @Y2John84]

House II: The Second Story released 39 years ago today.

28 August 1987 🤺