Bogle's bet — is low-cost indexing still the hurdle everything else must clear?
Bogle is a member of the Blaque Baux family. The core repo is the engine and blueprint — a governed, systematic platform (Julia) with a venue-agnostic execution controller and a Layer-3 live-money safety gate. Bogle points that engine at the benchmark itself — Vanguard's low-cost funds — and inherits the governance wholesale.
Not investment advice. Educational/research software. Nothing here is validated. See LICENSE.
git clone --recursive https://github.com/blaquebaux/bogle.git
julia --project=engine -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.instantiate()' # one-time engine setupJack Bogle's claim is the most subversive one in finance: after costs, you can't reliably beat the
low-cost total-market index, so owning it is the winning strategy. This sleeve is deliberately a
meta-sleeve — it studies the fund family (VOO, VTI, VTV, VUG, VYM, VIG, VXUS, BND,
VNQ, VT) not to find an edge in it, but to quantify the hurdle every other Blaque Baux sleeve
must clear net of cost. In a real sense the whole family's discipline — "put most of it on the record as
rejected" — is the Bogle test applied to ourselves: if a sleeve can't beat VT/VOO risk-adjusted, it
isn't a keeper.
Data honesty — clean, ETF-based, and honestly circular. Vanguard's ETFs are directly priceable, so
there's no data gap. The one caveat is that this sleeve is the benchmark, so "does Bogle win?" is nearly
tautological — the value isn't a discovery, it's a calibrated hurdle (the passive Sharpe/Jensen-alpha
baseline) and a check on whether Vanguard's factor tilts (VTV, VIG, VYM) add anything over plain VOO.
- The passive hurdle.
VT/VOO/VTI: Sharpe, Jarque-Bera, and the reference Jensen's-alpha/M² line every other sleeve is measured against. Establish the number to beat. - Do Vanguard's tilts beat plain index?
VTV/VUG/VYM/VIG/VNQvsVOO: Jensen's alpha and M² — does any factor fund clear its own extra (tiny) cost, or is plain total-market the honest default? - Cross-sleeve scorecard. Re-express the family's live sleeves (broad, bonds, blackstone, bridgewater) as Jensen's alpha / M² over the Bogle hurdle — a single honest "did it beat indexing?" column.
Full detail in research/README.md. Scorecard (Alpaca SIP, 2016–2026, vs VOO):
| # | Question | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The passive hurdle | ✅ VOO Sharpe +0.89 / CAGR +15% / maxDD −34% (NON-normal, skew −0.28); broader diversification cost return (VTI α −0.7%, VT α −1.6%) |
| 2 | Do Vanguard's tilts beat VOO? | ✅ 0/7 — tilting buys a different beta, not alpha (VUG +17% CAGR is pure beta 1.14, α +0.2%; BND/VNQ/VXUS drag) |
| 3 | Can popular active/thematic funds beat VOO? | ✅ 2/10 (QQQ, XLK — pure tech-beta, a regime bet); ARKK −81% maxDD / M² −6.6%, the cautionary tale |
The synthesis: Bogle is right, and the fat-tail toolkit makes it precise — the low-cost index is a
genuinely hard hurdle. Broader diversification cost return this US-led decade; not one of Vanguard's own
tilts beat plain VOO risk-adjusted; and the popular alternatives that did win ex-post were pure tech/growth
beta (not repeatable skill), while the hot "innovation" pick (ARKK) hid a −81% drawdown behind a decent
headline return. This is the Bogle test applied to the family itself: the VOO line (Sharpe +0.89 /
Jensen-α = 0 / M² = 0) is the bar every sleeve must clear net of cost and tax.
Research: first pass complete — a meta-sleeve that calibrates the hurdle. Broader diversification cost return this decade; 0/7 Vanguard tilts beat plain VOO; only 2/10 popular funds cleared it (tech-beta, not skill). Not a tradeable edge — the honest baseline the rest of the family is measured against. No trading driver; it publishes the hurdle for the family (below).
bogle's product for the family is the hurdle itself. live/bogle_hurdle.py
(a) publishes the current plain-VOO baseline to ~/.config/blaquebaux/bogle_hurdle.txt (trailing Sharpe /
CAGR / vol / maxDD — the bar), and (b) scores any ticker against VOO on the honest numbers — Jensen's
alpha and M² (Sharpe-difference form, so VOO vs itself = 0) — with a clears/no verdict. Read-only on prices.
python3 live/bogle_hurdle.py # publish ~/.config/blaquebaux/bogle_hurdle.txt
python3 live/bogle_hurdle.py score QQQ ARKK # did these beat the index? (α / M² vs VOO)Sanity-checked: SPY ≈ VOO (α +0.0% → no), QQQ beats (α +2.2%), ARKK fails (α −4.9%, −81% DD). This
makes the yardstick reusable — any sleeve, or the family monitor, can ask "did it actually clear Bogle?"
Blaque Baux is a quantitative research initiative and a subsidiary of Carter Warrens. BlaqueBaux.com is the home for the work; the code lives here on GitHub — open to study, test, and build bespoke strategies on top of.
Anyone can point an AI at a market. The edge is understanding what the data actually says — and turning it into something you can act on. We test relentlessly and put most of it on the record as rejected, with the reason; what survives is built, governed, and validated before it is ever called real. That combination — honest research, reproducible evidence, and execution you can trust — is why Carter Warrens leads on strategy and implementation, not merely uses the tools everyone now has.
This repo is one sleeve of the Blaque Baux family — a single governed engine steered in many directions. The core repo is the base/blueprint and holds the full family roster.
engine/ the Blaque Baux platform (git submodule -> blaquebaux/base)
research/ _bogle_common.py (loaders + JB/Jensen/M² toolkit) + bogle_1_hurdle / _2_tilts / _3_hurdle_scoreboard + scorecard
live/ bogle_hurdle.py (publishes bogle_hurdle.txt + scores any ticker vs VOO) + run_bogle_hurdle.sh + plist
live/ governed live drivers (once a sleeve graduates to paper A/B)
MIT. (c) 2026 Carter Warrens.