American Association of Individual Investors: “It should come as no surprise that behavioral finance research makes a strong case for buying and holding low-cost, broadly-diversified index funds.”

Mark Balasa, CPA, CFP: “That three-pronged approach is going to beat the vast majority of the individual stock and bond portfolio—that most people have at brokerage firms. There is a certain elegance in the simplicity of it.”

Christine Benz, Morningstar Director of Personal Finance: “It’s hard to find fault with the ‘three-fund portfolio’ espoused by many Bogleheads.”

Bill Bernstein, author of The Four Pillars of Investing: “Does this [Three-Fund] portfolio seem overly simplistic, even amateurish? Get over it. Over the next few decades, the overwhelming majority of all professional investors will not be able to beat it.”

Jack Bogle: “The beauty of owning the market is that you eliminate individual stock risk, you eliminate market sector risk, and you eliminate manager risk”; and from his Common Sense on Mutual Funds, “There may be better investment strategies than owning just three broad-based index funds but the number of strategies that are worse is infinite.”

Scott Burns, financial columnist: “The odds are really, really poor that any of us will do better than a low-cost broad index fund.”

Jonathan Burton, MarketWatch: “There are plenty of ways to complicate investing, and plenty of people who stand to make money from you as a result. So just think of a three-fund strategy as something you won’t have to think about too much.”

Andrew Clarke, co-author of Wealth of Experience: “If your stock portfolio looks very different from the broad stock market, you’re assuming additional risk that may, or may not, pay off.”

Jonathan Clements, author and Wall Street Journal columnist: “Using broad-based index funds to match the market is, I believe, brilliant in its simplicity.”

John Cochrane, President, American Finance Association: “The market in aggregate always gets the allocation of capital right.”

Consumer Reports Money Book: “Simply buy the market as a whole.”

Aswath Damodaran, Professor at New York University and author of more than 20 finance books: “Beating the market is never easy and anyone who argues otherwise is fighting history and ignoring the evidence.”

Phil DeMuth, author of The Affluent Investor: “Buying and holding a few broad market index funds is perhaps the most important move ordinary investors can make to supercharge their portfolios.”

Laura Dogu, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua and co-author of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning: “With only these three funds in your investment portfolio you can benefit from low costs and broad diversification and still have a portfolio that is easy to manage.”

Charles Ellis, author of Winning the Loser’s Game: “The stock market is clearly too efficient for most of us to do better.”

Eugene Fama, Nobel Laureate: “For most people, the market portfolio is the most sensible decision.”

Rick Ferri, Forbes columnist and author of six investment books: “The older I get, the more I believe the 3-fund portfolio is an excellent choice for most people. It’s simple, cheap, easy to maintain, and has no tracking error that would cause emotional abandonment to the strategy.”

Mark Hulbert, Hulbert Financial Digest: “Buying and holding a broad-market index fund remains the best course of action for most investors.”

Sheldon Jacobs, author of Guide to Successful No-Load Fund Investing: “The best index fund for almost everyone is the Total Stock Market Index Fund. The fund can only go wrong if the market goes down and never comes back again, which is not going to happen.”

Kiplinger’s Retirement Report: “You’ll beat most investors with just three funds that cover the vast majority of global stock and bond markets: Vanguard Total Stock Market; Vanguard Total International Stock Index and Vanguard Total Bond Market Index.”

Lawrence Kudlow, CNBC: “I like the concept of the Wilshire 5000, which essentially gives you a piece of the rock of all actively-traded companies.”

Professor Burton Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street: “I recommend a total market index fund—one that follows the entire U.S. stock market. And I recommend the same approach for the U.S. bond market and international stocks.”

Harry Markowitz, Nobel Laureate: “A foolish attempt to beat the market and get rich quickly will make one’s broker rich and oneself much less so.”

Bill Miller, famed fund manager: “With the market beating 91% of surviving managers since the beginning of 1982, it looks pretty efficient to me.”

E. F. Moody, author of No Nonsense Finance: “I am increasingly convinced that the best investment advice for both individual and institutional equity investors is to buy a low-cost broad-based index fund that holds all the stocks comprising the market portfolio.”

The Motley Fool: “Invest your long-term moolah in index mutual funds that are designed to track the performance of a broad market index.”

John Norstad, mathematician: “For total market investors, the three disciplines of history, arithmetic, and reason all say that they will succeed in the end.”

Anna Prior, Wall Street Journal writer: “A simple portfolio of 3 funds. It may sound counter-intuitive, but for the average individual investor, less is actually more.”

Jane Bryant Quinn, syndicated columnist and author of Making the Most of Your Money: “The dependable great investment returns come from index funds which invest in the stock market as a whole.”

Pat Regnier, former Morningstar analyst: “We should just forget about choosing fund managers and settle for index funds to mimic the market.”

Ron Ross, author of The Unbeatable Market: “Giving up the futile pursuit of beating the market is the surest way to increase your investment efficiency and enhance your financial peace of mind.”

Allan Roth, CPA, CFP, financial advisor and author of How a Second Grader Beat Wall Street: “The beauty of a 3-fund portfolio is that it automatically builds the global portfolio without having to worry about standard deviations, correlations, Sharpe ratios, and the like.”

Paul Samuelson, Nobel Laureate: “The most efficient way to diversify a stock portfolio is with a low-fee index fund. Statistically, a broadly-based stock index fund will outperform most actively-managed equity portfolios.”

Bill Schultheis, author of The Coffeehouse Investor: “You don’t need to have eight funds. You can do it with two or three and have a great portfolio.”

Chandan Sengupta, author of The Only Proven Road to Investment Success:“Use a low-cost, broad-based index fund to passively invest in a little bit of a large number of stocks.”

Prof. Jeremy Siegel, author of Stocks for the Long Run: “For most of us, trying to beat the market leads to disastrous results.”

Dan Solin, author of The Smartest Portfolio You’ll Ever Own: “You can get as simple or as complicated as you’d like. You can keep it very simple by owning just three mutual funds that invest in domestic stocks, foreign stocks, and bonds. That’s precisely what I recommend in my model portfolios.”

William Spitz, author of Get Rich Slowly: “Few are able to beat a simple strategy of buying and holding the securities that comprise the market.”

Professor Meir Statman, author of What Investors Really Want: “It makes sense to have those three funds. What makes it hard is that it seems too simple to actually be a winner.”

Robert Stovall, investment manager: “It’s just not true that you can’t beat the market. Every year about one-third do it. Of course, each year it is a different group.”

Peter D. Teresa, Morningstar Senior Analyst:“My recommendation: A fund that indexes the entire market, such as Vanguard Total Stock Market Index.”

Kent Thune, CFP, editor of The Financial Philosopher: “In keeping with the virtues of passive investing, combined with Bogle’s haystack philosophy, we can capture the entire market of securities with Vanguard index funds, investing in just three broad categories: U.S. stocks, foreign stocks and bonds.”

Walter Updegrave, author and senior editor of Money magazine: “Simply invest in the following three funds (or their ETF equivalents): a total U.S. stock market fund, a total international stock market fund and a total U.S bond market fund. Do that, and you’ll gain exposure to virtually every type of publicly-traded stock in the world (large and small, growth and value, domestic and foreign, all industries and sectors), as well as the entire U.S. investment-grade taxable bond market (short- to-long-term maturities, corporates, Treasuries and mortgage-backed issues).”

Wilshire Associates: “The market portfolio offers the best ratio of return to risk.”

Jason Zweig, Wall Street Journal’s finance columnist, commenting on the Benjamin Graham classic, The Intelligent Investor: “The single best choice for a lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund.”