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The past few weeks of stock market whipsawing have been a gut check for internet communities that swelled in numbers during the usually excellent markets of the past five years. The WallStreetBets subreddit that came to prominence during the 2021 GameStop moment is a digital watering hole for people who think they can make a buck whether the markets are going up or down. Things have not been happy at WSB, as any scroll through the most-upvoted posts of the past month would reveal. In viral posts, people are calling themselves slurs for not selling put options (thereby profiting off market downturns) at the right moment. They’re posting screenshots of the thousands of dollars they’ve laid on the line in options trades (something they’re not alone in doing right now). Some are throwing themselves forward as cautionary tales, like the person whose $560,000 portfolio three months ago had become a $270,000 portfolio by last week. (The market as a whole isn’t down nearly that much.)
WallStreetBets is extreme, but in most any financial subreddit, you’ll find fear and regret as Donald Trump throws markets into chaos. “Feeling the heat today,” someone posted in r/investing. “What’s the plan overall?” In r/stocks, yet another investing subreddit, one person wrote, “I told my parents to buy near peak and now I feel terrible.” He elaborated: “I just wanted to write this some where cause I feel like a clown right now. I should have told them to wait with how Trump is imposing tariffs everywhere.” These are among the most popular posts on forums with millions of users apiece. Most of the time in the past few years, the people who have flocked to these spaces have celebrated wins with each other. Now they’re processing losses, at least most of the time. (The roller coaster also goes up some days, as it did when the S&P 500 improved by 2 percent on Friday. Now we await the next elevation change.)
In these perilous times, one online community is a port in the storm, full of members who were built for this moment and are now (mostly) flexing their muscles as they ride it out. They call themselves “Bogleheads,” and they stand up as proof that getting financial advice from strangers on the internet is not automatically as grimy as it sounds. That is because the Bogleheads’ entire ethos is that you, a regular person on the internet, should not assume you know much about the stock market. By acknowledging your own lack of special knowledge or skill, you can profit. As the market goes on a roller coaster, every investment banker and financial analyst in the world has an opinion about how you should react. The Bogleheads’ message is much simpler and very likely the best you can do given the information available: Just chill, and trust that if you have money in the stock market, your money will eventually grow.
The Bogleheads are not new. They have been around since 1998, when some Vanguard retail investors started posting with each other on a message board. They are disciples of Vanguard founder John Bogle, a pioneer of index fund investing who believed in (and profited from) the idea that most investors would be best off if they never tried to pick individual stocks and instead placed their investments in low-cost index funds that tracked the whole stock market. Some die-hards have had their own message board since 2007. A few of them wrote a book—Bogle penned the foreword—around the same time. Lately, though, the Bogleheads have seen their ranks swell. The r/bogleheads subreddit had fewer than 20,000 subscribers at the onset of the pandemic. It remains a niche community but is up to 628,000 members now.
That’s major growth, but nothing like what WallStreetBets has seen in the same period. The past five years, after all, have been good ones to not be a Boglehead. The Boglehead approach of buying market-matching index funds has done quite well. The Vanguard Total Market Index Fund is a popular Boglehead pick, offering retail investors the chance to own a little piece of all of the world’s big public companies for almost nothing in fees. VTI has grown 104 percent the past five years, which is nice—but it’s not Bitcoin, which has grown nearly 1,300 percent in the same span. When the market is good and highly speculative investments are doing well, it’s not sexy to follow Bogle’s path.
Times have changed. Being a Boglehead of late hasn’t been fun; nobody enjoys a stock market decline of 10 percent. But it’s been quite a bit more fun to lose that much, purely on paper, than to be a WallStreetBets cautionary tale drowning in a sea of doomed options trades or a Tesla investor losing 30 percent and wondering if your prized stock will go into the tank forever because of Elon Musk. Bogleheads have lost on Tesla too, but Tesla makes up just 1.39 percent of VTI. Most other companies you’ve heard of make up much less than that. When things are bad, it’s nice to be diversified.
The Boglehead subreddit reflects this feeling. There have been many panickers who have wandered into the forum to express their doubts or seek validation for doing the least Boglehead thing of all: selling stocks in a downturn rather than continuing to buy them. But the market correction has mostly served as a weed-out class for Bogleheads who weren’t really up to the Bogle ideology. The subreddit’s top post of the last week is one castigating the heretics: “The amount of people not staying the course, not continuing to invest, looking at their balance every day, and general hysteria is comical.” The Boglehead ideology abhors selling stock in response to a downturn, because it holds that none of us know when the market will go up or down. We only know that the line graph of the total stock market over the decades has gone up and to the right, and so investing in regular intervals and not pulling out in a bad month is the best we can do.
“Sometimes people ask, ‘That’s it? You buy a couple of index funds and then do nothing for 20 years? What’s the point of this subreddit?’ ” one Boglehead told their compatriots last week. “This. This is the point.”
I have joined the Bogleheads over the past few years. I cut ties with my financial adviser, even though he was a nice guy, because the Bogleheads impressed upon me two key facts: Most financial professionals do not beat the stock market with any reliability, and all of them cost money. I only buy broad-market index funds, which are excellent for both cost and time management. I lack the expertise to pick individual stocks or the appetite to wade into options trading, and knowing that my stock holdings are more or less an exact match for what the entire stock market is doing brings tremendous peace of mind.
This description somewhat flattens the Boglehead way of doing business. Ask 20 people how much of a Boglehead’s portfolio should be in international stocks or bonds, and you’ll get 20 different answers. But the group’s overarching worldview is the safest bet for both the financial and mental health of anyone who’s interested in having a comfortable retirement: Invest what you can in broad funds that cost very little money. Keep doing it, and only sell when you have a better reason than discomfort with how the market has changed over the past few weeks or months or even years. While American democracy dangles by a thread and the stock market has a horrible time, I draw comfort from knowing my financial fortunes aren’t any better or worse than most other people’s.
None of this is very exciting, which could limit the Bogleheads’ long-term prospects for growth. Seth Rogen will not star in a movie about the Boglehead subreddit, because checking one’s brokerage account a few times a month and setting up automated transfers to buy index funds is just not as cool as formulating an attack on short-selling hedge funds to boost a flailing video game retailer. In times when the stock market is good, being a Boglehead is great, but it’s not cool. In times when the stock market is bad, though, being a Boglehead is better than doing the worst thing of all: panicking.
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