Jonathan Clements, a longtime personal finance columnist at The Wall Street Journal, died Sunday at the age of 62 from cancer.
Jason Zweig of The Journal writes, “Clements, 62 years old, died in Philadelphia on Sunday, about a year-and-a-half after being diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer. Between 1994 and 2008, he wrote 1,009 columns on investing, financial planning, money and life for the Journal.
“Clements was one of the first financial journalists to argue for index funds. His advocacy, he conceded in a 1999 column, was nearly an ‘obsession’ that irked many readers.
“In the 1990s, professional investors often derided index funds as inferior and a guarantee of mediocrity; Clements praised them as a sure way to minimize the risk of underperforming the market. Following the trail Clements had blazed, millions of investors eventually made index funds the building blocks of their portfolios.
“Clements also lambasted high fees, murky disclosures and misleading practices. Among his targets: incubation, in which fund companies nurtured many funds in secret, launching only the winners and burying the records of the losers; proliferating share classes with complicated fees; and fund mergers in which a well-performing minnow swallowed a whale with putrid returns, making the big loser’s record disappear.”
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