r/Bogleheads rules, stats, and what to post

This is a community for passive investors who follow Jack Bogle's approach. The description spells it out plainly: diversify with low-cost index funds, split money between equities and fixed income, pay low fees, and stay the course. The people here are long-term investors who believe in buying and holding rather than picking stocks or timing the market. The rules reflect that same belief. Everything posted must connect clearly to passive investing, and the mods remove anything that does not help someone invest this way. There is no room for hype, shortcuts, or side conversations.

Four rules do almost all of the deciding here. “No spam or self-promotion” is the hard wall, because you cannot promote anything you made, sell, or monetize, and that covers most things a founder would want to share. “No non-substantive content” matters because short answers, yes or no replies, ticker symbols, emojis, and jokes all get removed, so every comment needs reasoning behind it. “No off-topic content” keeps the room on passive investing only, so strategies like stock picking, market timing, or crypto are not up for discussion, and neither is anything political. “No Misinformation” is less obvious for marketers but still bites, because overly certain predictions about the future or shaky claims can get pulled even when they are part of a pitch you never made.

For a founder, the honest answer is that almost nothing marketing-shaped survives here, so the goal shifts to being useful and learning the room. The one shape that works is a substantive, text-first post that shares your own experience with index investing, written in your own words with real reasoning behind every claim. Explain what you did, why you did it, and what the tradeoffs were, because the sub demands reasoning and rejects thin answers. Questions also work, but only sharp ones tied to the philosophy, like how to think through a diversification choice or a fee question, not a yes or no prompt. Stay strictly on passive investing topics, cite reputable sources where you have them, and leave every product, link, and pitch out of the thread entirely.

The clearest way to get removed is to promote anything you make or earn from, which “No spam or self-promotion” covers. “No non-substantive content” catches short answers, yes or no replies, bare ticker symbols, emojis, jokes, memes, milestone posts without heavy context, and anything AI-generated or copied without attribution. “No off-topic content” removes anything without a clear connection to passive investing, plus stock picking, market timing, crypto, political takes, and joke comments. “No Misinformation” removes false or misleading claims, conspiracy theories, overly confident forecasts, extreme alarmism, and recommending large language models for financial answers. “No incivility” removes personal attacks, insults, slurs, vulgar language, and public arguments about whether content is AI generated, and the rule says to use the report system or message the mods instead.

This may be the strictest community I have written about, because even a yes or no answer or a ticker symbol can get removed. The AI rules stand out too, since the sub bans recommending large language models for financial answers and also bans arguing about AI content in public. If you come here as a founder, come to learn the philosophy, not to pitch, because there is almost no seam in these rules for promotion to slip through.