Emotional rescue: Especially after a prolonged downturn, people can feel tempted to cut their losses, he said. "But, really, the investors that fare the best are the ones that avoid those urges."
So, along with the financial nuts and bolts of managing people's money, Vanguard works to temper their feelings. "We just constantly try to urge people to smooth out their emotions: When they're feeling distraught, try to smooth that out, and when they're feeling overly optimistic, try to knock that down, too.
"We just say, 'Don't think too much about the stock market,' " he said. "Establish the plan in a rational moment, and then don't revise it in an irrational moment."
The man behind the message: "I think people would say that I'm pretty laid-back," Sauter said. "I grew up in Ohio."
The finance bug bit him when he was 8 years old and started a bank for the neighborhood children. At 12, he bought his first stock - in the Cleveland Cavaliers.
He studied economics as an undergraduate at Dartmouth University and got his M.B.A. in finance from the University of Chicago.
His snappy catchphrase: "Investors should establish a long-term asset allocation that's appropriate for them, taking into account their own needs and their own tolerance for risk."
When someone he meets at a party asks for stock market advice, "I go into the same boring line," he said. "Think of your long-term asset allocation . . . ." Then he watches their eyes glaze over.
His wife, Karen, while also laid-back, is "much more social," Sauter said. "I guess we just don't overreact."
The trading day that rattled even him: The Monday after the Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. collapse in March, when no one knew how the market would react to the Federal Reserve's interventions.
"I'd have to say that was the scariest day of my professional career," Sauter said. "I started here two weeks before the crash of '87, and that day was scarier."
