Fifty years ago, on August 31, 1976, a small Pennsylvania asset manager launched a fund that almost nobody wanted to buy. The First Index Investment Trust, today the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, aimed to raise $150 million and barely gathered $11.3 million. The industry mockingly dubbed it “Bogle’s folly”: who would pay for a fund that gave up on beating the market from the start?
Fifty years later, the answer is overwhelming. A $10,000 investment in that fund in 1976 would be worth more than $2.4 million today (240 times more). And the idea John Bogle defended against all odds, broad diversification, minimal costs and the discipline to stay invested, has become the backbone of portfolios for millions of investors worldwide. Vanguard estimates that, since 2000 alone, indexing has saved investors around $570 billion in fees.
That is the anniversary being celebrated these days. But there is a second story, less often told and, for European investors, probably more important: index investing is no longer just Vanguard.
Index investing is a global, competitive industry with many more top-tier players, especially in Europe.
And that is great news for investors.
From heresy to a €3 trillion industry (in European ETFs alone)
In 2026, the European ETF market surpassed €3 trillion in assets for the first time, after a record first half with more than €221 billion in net inflows. By the end of July it had already reached €3.12 trillion (around $3.8 trillion), and industry projections suggest it could approach $4.6 trillion by 2031.
And who manages all that money? Curiously, Vanguard does not lead its own revolution, at least not in Europe:
iShares (BlackRock) clearly dominates, with more than $1.3 trillion in European ETFs. But what matters most is the pack behind it: Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, strengthened after absorbing Lyxor in 2022, Xtrackers (DWS, part of the Deutsche Bank group), and only then Vanguard, followed by UBS, Invesco and SPDR (State Street).
Two of Europe’s three largest ETF providers are European asset managers.
Concentration remains notable —iShares, Amundi and Xtrackers together account for around 62% of the market— but the remaining 38% is spread across more than 160 additional providers:
And index funds tell the same story
ETFs are only half the story. For Spanish investors, traditional index funds also carry a decisive tax advantage: transferability, which allows money to be moved between funds without paying tax on capital gains until the final redemption.
If we combine both vehicles, index funds and ETFs, the European map of passive investing confirms the same conclusion.
According to Morningstar, Europe’s 100 largest fund houses hold around €4 trillion in passive strategies (index funds plus ETFs), distributed among the leaders as follows:
BlackRock accounts for roughly a third of the total. But behind it lies a broad and highly competitive ecosystem: Vanguard and UBS practically tied for second place, Amundi and DWS with very solid positions, and State Street and Invesco completing the leading group. In fact, UBS, Amundi and DWS combined manage total assets in European funds and ETFs comparable to BlackRock’s alone.
To this group we should add managers such as Fidelity and Pictet, with highly competitive index fund ranges in Spain. Brand leadership is no longer automatic.
Why this is good news: competition works for the investor
The moral of these 50 years is not that Vanguard won the game. It is that Bogle’s idea won the game, and today it is executed by dozens of asset managers competing fiercely with one another.
That competition has direct, measurable effects for investors:
Fees (TERs) keep falling. When Amundi launches a cheaper global fund, Vanguard responds with fee cuts; when Fidelity pushes on the MSCI World, iShares reacts. Vanguard itself carried out the largest fee cut in its history in early 2025. Every move by one manager puts pressure on the rest, and the winner is always the investor.
Vanguard, for example, has just launched three new ETFs that are highly competitive and will be worth considering as they gain scale.
Moreover, each manager has different strengths: some stand out in global equities on pure cost, others in fixed income on replication quality, others in emerging markets or currency-hedged share classes. The “best index fund” is no longer a question with a single answer: it depends on the asset class, fund domicile, replication quality and total cost, and more and more variables need to be considered to answer that question.
A broad supply also makes it possible to diversify across managers
And here comes the practical implication that is often overlooked. Diversifying a portfolio is not just about spreading across stocks and bonds, or across regions. It is also worth diversifying across asset managers, at least from the perspective of an investment portfolio manager like inbestMe.
In a market where BlackRock, Vanguard, UBS, Amundi, DWS, Fidelity and State Street (among others) compete head to head, giving up that competition in advance makes little sense. The alternative is to treat manager selection as what it is: a technical decision, asset class by asset class, reviewable over time.
inbestMe’s investment committee believes that concentrating an entire portfolio in a single provider introduces unnecessary risk: if that manager stops being the most competitive in an asset class, changes its fee or replication policy, or suffers any operational setback, the whole portfolio feels it at once.
At inbestMe we have applied this from day one: our portfolios combine index funds and ETFs from different managers, selecting for each asset class the most efficient vehicle by total cost, replication quality and size, and we review that selection periodically precisely because the market keeps moving.
It is, ultimately, the most faithful way to honor the idea born 50 years ago.
Bogle did not champion a brand: he championed investors keeping as much of the market’s return as possible. Half a century later, the best way to achieve that is to harness all the competition his idea made possible.
Index investing should be the core of individual investors’ wealth, in Europe too
The index investing (or passive investing) revolution began 50 years ago, it is here to stay, and it is undoubtedly the best option for managing the core of individual investors’ wealth.
While in the US it already exceeds 50% in some asset classes, Europe still lags well behind. According to the most robust data available, index investing represents approximately 30% of total long-term fund assets in Europe.
Individual investors in Spain and across Europe should also turn this to their advantage and open their minds to this way of investing: there is no longer any reason not to capture the return of the “market” through index funds or ETFs.
That is perhaps the best possible tribute on this 50th anniversary: Bogle’s idea no longer belongs to anyone because it belongs to everyone. Indexing is, today, part of humanity’s heritage.
Sources: Vanguard (50th anniversary press release, August 2026); LSEG Lipper, European ETF Industry Review (July 2026); ETFGI (July 2026); TrackInsight (January 2026); Morningstar, Fund Family Digest: Europe 2025 (data as of 31/08/2025); Mordor Intelligence (2026).
