Robin Wigglesworth Books
Robin Wigglesworth is the global finance correspondent for the Financial Times. He covers the intersection of markets, economics, and geopolitics, and has written extensively on the evolution of investing and financial technology.
Known for: Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
Books by Robin Wigglesworth
Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
Trillions tells the remarkable story of one of the most important financial inventions of the modern era: the index fund. What began as a radical, even laughable, challenge to Wall Street orthodoxy became a force that transformed investing for pension funds, institutions, and everyday savers around the world. In this lively and deeply reported book, Robin Wigglesworth traces how an unlikely coalition of academics, data obsessives, contrarian money managers, and stubborn idealists dismantled the old belief that expensive experts could reliably beat the market. Instead, they advanced a simpler proposition: for most investors, owning the market cheaply and patiently is the winning strategy. The book matters because passive investing now shapes retirement systems, asset management, and even corporate power on a global scale. Understanding its rise means understanding modern finance itself. Wigglesworth, a seasoned Financial Times journalist, brings unusual authority to the subject. He combines historical depth, market knowledge, and sharp storytelling to explain not just the mechanics of indexing, but also the personalities, rivalries, and cultural clashes behind it. The result is both a history of finance and a guide to how investing was permanently changed.
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The Cult of the Stock Picker
Every investing revolution begins by challenging a deeply held belief, and before index funds, the dominant faith was in human brilliance. For decades, Wall Street ran on the conviction that talented fund managers, armed with insight, discipline, and intuition, could identify mispriced securities an...
From Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
Efficient Markets Rewrote Investment Logic
Sometimes the most disruptive ideas emerge not from practice but from theory. One of the intellectual foundations of indexing came from Eugene Fama and the development of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which argued that market prices already incorporate available information so quickly and broadly...
From Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
Theory Became an Investable Product
A financial idea matters only when someone figures out how to implement it. The leap from academic insight to investable product was one of the boldest transitions in modern finance. Early indexing experiments faced ridicule because they appeared to surrender the game. Why would anyone deliberately ...
From Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
John Bogle Democratized Market Returns
Some revolutions need a theorist, but others need a crusader. John Bogle was the figure who turned indexing from an institutional curiosity into a populist movement. He believed that ordinary investors were being quietly exploited by an industry that charged too much, traded too often, and delivered...
From Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
Institutions Gave Indexing Real Legitimacy
Financial ideas become permanent when large institutions adopt them. Indexing may have started as an intellectual rebellion, but it gained real power when pension funds, endowments, and large fiduciaries began to embrace it. These investors were less interested in market myths and more focused on me...
From Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
ETFs Supercharged Passive Investing’s Growth
A revolution accelerates when it becomes more convenient. Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, transformed indexing from a sensible long-term strategy into a highly flexible financial tool. By allowing investors to buy and sell diversified baskets of securities throughout the trading day, ETFs combined t...
From Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
About Robin Wigglesworth
Robin Wigglesworth is the global finance correspondent for the Financial Times. He covers the intersection of markets, economics, and geopolitics, and has written extensively on the evolution of investing and financial technology.
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Robin Wigglesworth is the global finance correspondent for the Financial Times. He covers the intersection of markets, economics, and geopolitics, and has written extensively on the evolution of investing and financial technology.
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