Robert Brokamp

We have a great picture of him standing in front of the Bogle room at the Motley Fool.

And if you're going to invest in individual stocks, it certainly makes sense to track your returns.

Because if you're not outperforming, why bother with all the time and effort?

Now, you're someone who you have said, if I remember correctly, in past interviews, you were a stock picker.

You did invest in actively managed funds.

That's, in fact, how you achieved your financial independence.

And you did it through a good part of your life.

But eventually, you just said, why am I doing all this?

Why don't I just stick with the index fund?

Was it a matter of you just tracking your returns or was it a matter of just saying like the return on effort here is just not worth it?

One point you make in the book is that the value of just buying a total stock market index fund is it's not only helping you decide what to buy, but also to a degree what to sell because index funds are, as you say, self-cleansing.

Right.

Explain what that means.

In your book, you include charts showing the long-term upward trend of the U.S.

stock market.

It goes up to the right.

But if you look closely, there are times when stocks have gone up and down, but basically been flat maybe for a decade or more.

We saw 2000, 2013, late 60s, early 80s.

And then, of course, there was what you call the big ugly event, the Great Depression.

Stocks dropped in 1929, dropped 90%, and really didn't recover to the 1950s.