jebmke wrote: Sat Sep 27, 2025 8:36 am
iceport wrote: Sat Sep 27, 2025 8:12 am
There’s a nice page of tributes from some of Jonathan’s friends and colleagues over at The Humble Dollar:Kind words from: Christine Benz, William J. Bernstein, James Dahle, Rick Ferri, Peter Mallouk, Mike Piper, and Allan S. Roth.
J Zweig also has one in the WSJ today.
I’ve been trying to find an archived copy of the article since you mentioned it, to no avail. Hopefully someone with a subscription will make an archived copy, either in archive.org or archive.is, or some other service.
Paywalled article here: Saying Goodbye to the WSJ’s Jonathan Clements (A fond farewell from Jason Zweig and our readers to a gifted writer)
Fallible wrote: Sat Sep 27, 2025 5:30 pm
iceport wrote: Sat Sep 27, 2025 8:12 am
There’s a nice page of tributes from some of Jonathan’s friends and colleagues over at The Humble Dollar:Kind words from: Christine Benz, William J. Bernstein, James Dahle, Rick Ferri, Peter Mallouk, Mike Piper, and Allan S. Roth.
Thanks for posting this. The words of Christine Benz in particular remind me of what it was like to discover Jonathan Clements and his WSJ column in the ’90s – his “fearlessness, his willingness to speak truth to power,” and how he “railed against brokerage firms and asset managers peddling the investment du jour, even though many of them doubtless were Wall Street Journal advertisers. Rather cheekily, as someone on the Journal’s payroll, he also criticized the financial media for parroting Wall Street jargon and pinning deep meaning on daily market gyrations.”
And then Benz puts it all in perspective:
Index investing has been thoroughly mainstreamed over the past few decades, but it certainly wasn’t the default in the early 1990s, when Jonathan began urging investors to stop trying to beat the market and opt for inexpensive index funds instead. Like Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, he was ahead of the curve in realizing that bypassing expensive active strategies is the best way for investors to receive their fair share of the market’s gains. Broadcasting that message certainly wasn’t in Wall Street’s interest, but it helped scores of investors get closer to their goals.
You’re so right! His message was a direct affront to the status quo, and the WSJ couldn’t have been happy about that. Though something I read somewhere recently, not sure where, led me to wonder if his writing was just too damned popular for them to rein him in.
I loved reading his columns, even if I discounted his passive investing message at first. Oh, the overconfidence of youth!
And it actually took me a few years to figure out how to read his writing: very carefully. There was never a throw-away phrase or spare word. Every sentence was important. It’s not as if I had horrendous reading comprehension, but Jonathan was extremely concise. I only figured that out after I had learned a little bit more about the subject matter.
