Bob Pisani engagement report

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• Dec 31, 20256.7x their median

  Art Cashin, legendary head of floor trading for @UBS, passed away a year ago.  For decades, Cashin led the singing of “Wait til the Sun Shines Nellie” on the NYSE floor on New Year’s Eve.  He also composed an annual poem to look back at the year’s events. Art’s sons, Art Jr. and Peter Cashin, will lead the singing this year at 1:30 PM from the @NYSE floor, and they have also continued the tradition of writing the annual poem. We miss you Art! 

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• Jun 15, 202613x their median

  An historic bank is reopening in Philadelphia. After decades of being closed, the restoration of the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia is complete. The bank and the building itself are integral to the history of the U.S. economy. Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treausry, designed the plan for the bank. The bank helped stabilized the country’s finances, created a more reliable national currency, and laid the future groundwork for a national credit and banking system. The historic building will be celebrated with a sold-out reopening gala on June 16 and will officially reopen to the public on July 1, welcoming visitors back into one of the nation’s most important financial landmarks. I am honored to be a part of that gala. Congratulations to the National Park Service and the Independence Historical Trust, the philanthropic nonprofit partner that raises private support for Independence National Historical Park, for helping bring this remarkable project to life. Learn more here: https://t.co/EFoKNjVuDq Facebook: @IndeHistoricalTrust @IHTrust LinkedIn: https://t.co/WjmkNLOz5k

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• Aug 31, 202613x their median

  So great to be back on @CNBC with my old friend David Faber to discuss the 50th anniversary of the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which launched the indexing revolution. https://t.co/HfWxYCnfbi

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• Sep 20, 202212x their median

  Very excited my new book, "Shut Up and Keep Talking: Lessons on Life and Investing From the Floor of the New York Stock Exchange”,is out Oct. 18,a summary of what I learned from 25 years on @NYSE floor. Available for pre-order on Amazon.More to come! https://t.co/hE0jGZ1c14 @CNBC

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• Feb 25, 20268.0x their median

  I celebrated my birthday with the legendary Harry Poulakakos, founder of @harrysNYC at his fabulous West Palm Beach steakhouse. One of the world's great restauranteurs, Harry has that rare ability to make everyone feel like they are his friend. Thank you Harry! https://t.co/HbF1BXfglR

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• Apr 2, 20264.8x their median

  It's time to fight back against financial nihilism. Financial nihilism, the belief that investing is a joke, it's all a casino, is spreading. It's nonsense, and we need to argue vehemently against it. We can support financial innovation without supporting financial nihilism. We can support get rich slow versus get rich quick. https://t.co/G9fcTlYhJW @exchangeETF

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• Aug 28, 20264.1x their median

  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

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• Mar 23, 20263.7x their median

  Private equity and private credit are looking to sell a lot of assets to retail investors. Those retail investors should check to make sure they know where their wallets are before they invest. https://t.co/FkdmyNQgHg

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• Sep 11, 20263.6x their median

  9-11 twenty-five years later. Great to be back on CNBC with my old friend Morgan Brennan on the Morning Call show to talk about the 25th anniversary of 9-11. There’s a whole generation that wasn’t even born then that know little or nothing about it. There’s an obligation by those of us who were there to teach that generation about that event, but even more important there are broader lessons about the power of resilience in the face of disaster, lessons everyone can take to heart. https://t.co/5kJwdXaEUS

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• Mar 27, 20262.7x their median

  Tokenization (a security as a digital token on blockchain) of equities is now getting very real. NYSE and Nasdaq are making aggressive moves to get into the space. This is exciting, exactly what financial innovation is supposed to look like. It can potentially unlock liquidity by freeing up illiquid assets in real estate, art, private equity, etc. It could improve efficiency and increase transparency (in theory, there is a single record of asset ownership). It could also help dramatically accelerate automation of routine tasks like dividend distributions and proxy voting. But there are lots of issues that still need to be worked out, including who is the legally binding owner of a security, what rights these tokenized securities convey, development of global standards, and secondary market liquidity. If these and other issues can be worked out, there is obvious value here: the ability to move to a platform that controls the full workflow of issuance, clearance, settlement and custody, all of which are now handled separately. Reducing financial friction is one of the hallmarks of financial innovation. If this can be accomplished safely and securely, it will be a big leap forward for global markets. https://t.co/hhFfWsTsUe

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