I'm about halfway through. Bought it because I got tired of waiting for it at the library. It's great. Everyone should read it. I've only read half of it so I may end up with egg on my face from writing about it before finishing it.
It's full of fascinating tidbits like:
Trusts have a finite life span, which was initially supposed to be twenty-five years for SPDR. But they can also be tied to the longevity of individual people, so it was later amended and pegged to eleven children born around 1990–93, such as Weber’s daughter Emily, who was born on the same day that SPDR was established.35 As a result, SPDR will expire either on January 22, 2118, or twenty years after the death of the last survivor of the eleven people mentioned in the trust, whichever occurs first.
What follows is just my opinionated $0.02.
If there is a widespread belief that Bogle deserves the lion's share of the credit for the innovation of the index fund,
then there is a definite "mythbusting" flavor to the book.
This is a book that puts its weight on the side of giving most of the credit to McQuown, Fouse, the Samsonite Luggage fund, Batterymarch, the quantitative academic theorists, etc. and somewhat downplays Bogle's contribution. The most explicit such remark I've found so far is on p.107:
Bogle would later claim that he was ignorant of academic ideas like Markowitz’s modern portfolio theory and Fama’s efficient-markets hypothesis, and was at the time unfamiliar with the pioneering efforts of Wells Fargo, American National Bank, and Batterymarch. Given the coverage that they received in the industry press and Bogle’s wide-ranging intellect, voracious news consumption, and visits to Chicago, this simply isn’t credible.
Well, maybe it isn't. Quite possibly Bogle did some mythmaking. Anyway, in Wigglesworth's telling, it was others that did the heavy lifting and deserve the credit, in the same way as you might give Xerox PARC the credit for all the important work that later inspired Microsoft and Apple to recreate them as Windows and the Mac. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are more famous than Adele Goldberg, Douglas Engelbart, Butler Lampson...
The other thing that can be said is that Wigglesworth's point of view,
right or wrong, is pro-factor-investing, pro-ETF, and so on. For example,
Whatever the reason, the existence of some persistent investment factors is today accepted by almost every (if not all) financial economist and investor.
As part of the process of telling the story of the people who developed these, it is necessary for him to present them as Good Things.
Thus, here's a curious detail. He confirms my impression that Dimensional Fund Advisors was created specifically to launch what's now called the DFA US Micro Cap Portfolio, DFSCX:
Over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1980 at McQuown’s house in Mill Valley, a scenic town in the foothills of California’s Mount Tamalpais, they thrashed out the details of a new business that would sell a small-stocks index fund to pension funds.
What he doesn't mention is that from inception to date, DFSCX has underperformed the S&P 500. He writes from the unstated point of view that the "small firm effect" and the small-cap premium must be real, because they are part of the story of why DFA was created.
The section on ETF's is very interesting because it explains how the structure of ETFs, the creation units and so on, were a clever invention that needed to be invented
in order to make ETFs possible under existing securities regulations.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness; Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.