John C. Bogle, who founded the Vanguard Group of Investment Cos. in 1974 and built it into a giant mutual fund company, with $4.9 trillion in assets under management today, died Wednesday in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He was 89.

Vanguard announced his death. Bogle, who had struggled with a congenital heart defect and had several heart attacks, had received a heart transplant in 1996.

Bogle built Vanguard on a cornerstone belief that was anathema to most mutual fund companies: that over the long term, most investment managers cannot outperform the broad market averages. He popularized and became the leading proponent of indexing, the practice of structuring an investment portfolio to mirror the performance of a market yardstick, like the S&P 500 stock index.

“Indexing was the purview of institutional investors, but Jack Bogle came up with the consumer version,” said Daniel P. Wiener, the editor of The Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors, a newsletter and website that has tracked the company for decades. “He made people aware of expenses, and told them that costs come right out of the bottom line.”

But Bogle became a harsh critic of the mutual fund industry in later years. In the second half of the 1990s, he said, stock market investors were spoiled by average annual returns of more than 20 percent per year and, as a result, cared too little about the high expenses they were paying to mutual fund managers for those managers’ presumed expertise at picking stocks. Mutual fund companies, he said, were all but immoral for accepting such fees.

Since 1984, less than half of the actively managed mutual funds that invest in a broad array of American stocks have outperformed Vanguard’s Index 500 fund, one of the world’s largest, with more than $441 billion in assets under management, according to Vanguard.

After graduating magna cum laude from Princeton in 1951 with an economics degree, Bogle was hired by Walter L. Morgan, founder of the Wellington Fund, a Philadelphia-based fund management company. Morgan had read Bogle’s senior thesis on mutual funds.

While working his way up at Wellington, Bogle persuaded Morgan to introduce a new all-equity fund, called the Windsor Fund, to complement Wellington, which invested in both stocks and bonds.

Bogle was named president of Wellington in 1967, and soon thereafter it merged with the Boston investment company Thorndike, Doran, Paine & Lewis. Several years later, a management dispute with the principals of the new company led Bogle to depart; he founded Vanguard in 1974 to handle the administrative functions of the mutual funds overseen by Wellington Management.

Two years later, Bogle founded the Vanguard Index Trust, now known as the Index 500 fund, the first index fund for individual investors. The next year he again broke from industry practice, selling mutual funds directly to investors rather than through brokers, and thus eliminating the sales fees of up to 9 percent that funds typically charged.

He officially stepped down as chief executive of Vanguard in January 1996 and remained as chairman until the end of 1999. Tim Buckley is the current chief executive.

John Clifton Bogle was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on May 8, 1929. A twin brother, David, died in 1994.

Bogle graduated from Blair Academy in Blairstown, New Jersey, and, in 1951, from Princeton; he was a scholarship student at both.

Bogle married Eve Sherrerd in 1956. They had four daughters, Barbara Bogle Renninger, Jean Bogle, Nancy Bogle St. John and Sandra Bogle Marucci; two sons, John Jr. and Andrew; 12 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.