Good morning.

Earlier this month, I joined more than 350 other folks at the Bogleheads conference.

The Bogleheads are individual investors who offer each other, and the rest of the world, free investing advice on their online forum and Wiki pages.

Although Jack Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, died in 2019, the Bogleheads still follow his simple principles of low-cost, no-frills investing.

To summarize those principles by saying you should buy a handful of cheap, market-tracking index funds and then do nothing for at least 30 years would be an oversimplification — but not by much.

With a set of beliefs so simple, why would anyone bother attending a conference? It sounds about as exciting as the World Championships of Watching Paint Dry.

So I set out to learn why people would come from 38 states, plus Canada and Germany, to hang out at a resort hotel outside Chicago for a couple days of lectures about investing, taxes, retirement and other things they mostly already know.

Sharon Pichai, a 60-year-old from the Greenville, S.C. area with a master's degree in theology, told me a few days after the conference that she admires the Bogleheads who share their investment knowledge online for free.

"I was just trying to relearn things that I probably should know or knew but have forgotten," she said. "Some of these simple tips are hard to live by: easy to say, but hard to do."

I drew that same distinction between simple and easy in the first column I ever wrote for The Wall Street Journal:
     Investing is much like dieting: It is simple, but not easy. Everyone knows what it takes to lose weight. (Eat less, exercise more.) Nothing could be simpler, but few things are harder in a world full of chocolate cake and Cheetos.
     Likewise, investing is simple: Diversify, buy and hold, keep costs low. But simple isn't easy in a market seething with "free" online trades, funds that promise to transform losses into gains, and TV pundits who shriek out trading advice as if their underpants were on fire. The real secret to being, or becoming, an intelligent investor is bolstering your self-control.

"I know these people are real, but being around everyone in person, I just came home happy," Ms. Pichai told me, repeating it for emphasis: "I've really been a little happy all week long. It was like getting a booster shot: It upped my antibody level just a bit."

I think that's because investing, like life, is about striking the right balance between independence and interdependence.

To make the most of yourself, you can't let others do your thinking for you. But, to think for yourself, you must also rely on the wisdom of the best who have gone before you and the guidance of the best who are traveling alongside you. Otherwise you will be swayed by the loudest voices, whose behavior is often the worst.

"Most humans are looking for a tribe," Chris Kasenge, 35, a U.S. Army veteran and a technology manager in northern Virginia, told me. "Everybody is looking for validation in some ways, especially if you're trying to pursue a way of life that is contradictory to ideas like credit cards and debt and 'I want to be rich tomorrow!'"

He added, "There's something special about the solidarity of seeing people who’ve been on the same journey for 10 or 15 or more years — and a community of 30-somethings who aren't just like, 'I’ve gotta buy the newest flashy car.'"

As Geoffrey L. Cohen, a social psychologist at Stanford University, writes in his new book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides:
     Belonging is the feeling that we’re part of a larger group that values, respects, and cares for us — and to which we feel we have something to contribute. The word “belong” literally means “to go with,” and our species has evolved to journey through life with each other….If our lives are bereft of a feeling of connection, we can become vulnerable…to appeals by groups that make the belonging they provide contingent on acceptance of views and behavior that don't reflect our true values.

"Often, it is taboo to talk about financial things, even amongst friends," Bharath Sundararaman, 46, a project manager in the Dallas area, told me. "Money has an outsized impact on the rest of our lives, but there is nothing available to easily have these conversations."

He sees the Bogleheads as filling that void, offering "unbiased, crowdsourced advice that's almost like this rock of support." He added, "I don't need to worry about the next newfangled thing that's thrown at me. Whenever I’m confused I can be better informed within an hour or two."

Jennifer Stipe, 46, an online security engineer in Erie, Pa., told me how grateful she was that a colleague at her first job, when she was 22, prodded her into investing in her 401(k).

"You become a better person by hanging out with people who are better than you," she said. "Since I’ve gotten so many lucky breaks in my life, I feel obligated to pay that forward. I think there's that same sense in the Bogleheads, like they feel they’ve been very fortunate and need to share their time and expertise."

I first wrote about the Bogleheads more than 20 years ago, and I still find myself marveling at the same thing: With rare exceptions like Warren Buffett's annual meeting for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, the financial industry does almost nothing to make investors feel as if they belong to a part of a wholesome community.

Sure, trading apps goad speculators into double-dog-daring each other to take more risk, and various "community investing" sites encourage people to share trading ideas. All too often, the result is just a chest-pounding contest that has nothing to do with learning how to become a better investor.

In his book Belonging, Prof. Cohen describes an experiment in which volunteers imagined they had to put on a heavy backpack and then judge how steep a hill was. They perceived the hill as much less steep when they were with a friend than when they were alone.

What if investing firms fostered a community of people with a shared interest in patience, good judgment and skeptical analysis? Investors would be a lot more willing to go along for the ride if they felt they weren't alone. The hills and valleys of the markets feel a lot less steep when you feel you have friends going alongside you.

Do you have an investing mentor or friend you often turn to for guidance and counsel? What qualities does that person have that you value the most?

To share your thoughts, just reply to this email. Please give your name and location. Responses may be edited for length and clarity.

In the last issue, we looked at the origins and history of the word stock, which has its roots in the Old Teutonic stukko, meaning a tree or piece of wood. 

I wrote:
     The word stock, as a financial term, entered English to describe a piece of wood used to record transactions as early as the 12th century.

That prompted a remarkable email from reader Jerry O’Dell in Phoenixville, Pa.:
     ...you are talking my language when you talk about trees. I am a retired...arborist, and I had the honor and pleasure of managing the landscaping...at [the Vanguard Group's corporate headquarters near Valley Forge, Pa., starting in the 1980s]. Initially I wasn’t sure what Vanguard did or what a mutual fund was, but I often ran into Mr. Bogle, who was always very nice and often chatted with me.... From day one we always invested in the Vanguard stock/bond market index funds, which brings me back to your tree/wood discussion.
     ...I thought how the importance of biodiversity in urban forestry could relate to individual investing. A monoculture of a single species tree can be deadly and leave once-shady communities totally treeless. Think of our American Elm and Dutch Elm disease and our ash trees with emerald ash borer. I think the tree analogy equates well with investing: Tree monoculture = individual stock purchase, tree biodiversity = stock/bond market index fund investing.

Once you think of stocks as trees — which, linguistically, they are! — then you should remember that healthy forests are diversified. Your portfolio should be, too.

You don't have to be a Boglehead or even invest at Vanguard to benefit from radical simplicity.

Target-date funds, which combine stocks, bonds, cash and other assets in a predetermined mix that automatically becomes more conservative as investors approach retirement, are the ultimate form of investing simplicity. You pick a target-date fund in your 401(k) or other retirement plan, parcel money into it from every paycheck — and never need to do anything else until you change jobs or retire.

Target-date funds aren't perfect, but they unite the power of simplicity with the magic of leaving your money unmolested for years on end.

T. Rowe Price reports that in the second quarter of 2022, even as stocks lost 16% and bonds fell 5%, "only 0.2 percent of investors with all of their assets in target dates made any changes to their asset allocation." 

Retirement investors outside of target-date funds were 32 times more likely to make changes as the market plummeted, according to T. Rowe Price.

As I've often argued, the stereotype of individual investors as "dumb money" that panics in every downturn is absurdly inaccurate. At T. Rowe Price alone, target-date funds hold $311 billion — a vast bloc of money that is committed to the markets through thick and thin. When stocks go down, investors in these funds buy automatically.

You can't panic about buying into a falling stock market when you don't even realize you're doing it. That's another power of simplicity.

Be well and invest well,

Jason

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A jury convicted Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola, the electric-truck startup, in his federal fraud trial this month. How did a company whose technology didn't even work get to be worth $30 billion — and then fall by roughly 95%?

My colleague, ace reporter Ben Foldy, is telling the entire stunning story on the podcast Bad Bets Season 2: The Unraveling of Trevor Milton.

Episode 3 is just out, but I've loved listening to the whole series, and I think you might, too.

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You know what a friend is? Someone who knows all about you and likes you anyway.
—Bill Parcells