If all vanguard does is buy (not pick) stocks for you, why wouldn't you just skip the fee and buy the stocks yourself?
show me where I can buy stocks for free ?
Its cheaper to buy via vanguard.
Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
21–30 of 358 posts
Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#22Vanguard seems to have gone a bit too far with cost-cutting in the customer services department. One of my most frustrating recent experiences was dealing with Vanguard's website and customer service. There were all kinds of issues, some minor annoyances, others serious time sinks.
Here's an excerpt from a long and boring story:
... One day, I couldn't log in to their website. Attempting to go through "forgot my password" had me fill out a long form with security question. I filled it out, pressed submit, and was presented with the same form, but blank. No error message, nothing else. I thought their website must be broken that day, tried again the next day with the same result. After doing this a few times, I called them. Turns out, my account got into some invalid state. It took them more than a week after that to figure out what was wrong with the account and fix it.
Then, my account fixed, I tired to buy some eft-s. Website replies: "Cannot perform this transaction, call us for assistance". I think that's a temporary outage, try again the next day. I called them again, waited a while to get an agent, found out they needed some more documents from me. I sent them in, but there was no way to find out if they were happy with the documents on their website ...
Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#23Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#24Here's a question for someone more savvy than me. What happens if the vast majority of stock investments end up in vanguard funds? In an economic crises, will everyone try to sell the same set of funds and will crash the funds themselves?
If everyone sells then the market will go down as it does now. It doesn't make much difference if that happens via a fund holding or not.
You can't sell without having someone buying.
Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#25How does control/governance for Vanguard actually work? It's apparently owned by the investors in the funds, but I own some ETFs through Vanguard and I've never seen a proxy form.
Very happy with the service, just curious about that aspect.
Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you say Vanguard will collapse?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Articles like this showed up for Enron and MCI/WorldCom and all the others, extolling one virtue or another and showcasing their success. Now we have one for Vanguard, ergo it will fail. I'm not serious, of course. But pride does seem to come before the fall, and just out of an excess of caution I might move some money out of my vanguard funds next week.
You're comparing Vanguard to Enron & MCI / WorldCom. Would you mind explaining your analogy? It doesn't make sense to me. I don't think, for example, my investments in Vanguard funds are precarious because they are over-leveraged in bespoke weather derivatives.
Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#27Here's a question for someone more savvy than me. What happens if the vast majority of stock investments end up in vanguard funds? In an economic crises, will everyone try to sell the same set of funds and will crash the funds themselves?
Another effect is over-valuing of stocks with sufficiently high caps to enter the index being tracked.
(A similar already occurs with huge institutional investors (e.g. retirement fund managers) that have too much money to invest to worry about small caps - Warren Bufett also has this first-world problem. Yet another similar effect occurs through bigger caps getting more publicity, so more people invest in them, disproportionately driving up the price.)
The result is smaller caps become more attractive (to small investors). Which results in greater investment in them - but only up to the point allowed by the above effects. So the undervaluing persists.
Kinda similar to tiny startups finding tiny markets attractive, that aren't worth it for incumbent to pursue.
Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#28Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#29If all vanguard does is buy (not pick) stocks for you, why wouldn't you just skip the fee and buy the stocks yourself?
To get the equivalent of a total stock market index, you'd need a lot of capital and would spend a lot on trading fees. There are other issues like re-investing dividends, re-balancing, IPOs/bankruptcies, taxes, etc. Also, Vanguard is structured as a mutual company, so fees only pay for costs. The fees are really low too: a 10,000$ investment in VOO (S&P 500 ETF) would only cost you about 5$/year.
I actually opened a Vanguard account a few months ago after reading "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Gordon Malkiel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street). I recommend it if you are interested in learning more about investing and ETFs.
Re: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
#30If all vanguard does is buy (not pick) stocks for you, why wouldn't you just skip the fee and buy the stocks yourself?
1. Most of the people just want to set their allocation and no think about it more than a few times a year.
2. Without Vanguard(and other index funds), you do not quality for admiral shares.
3. Vanguard's fees are among the lowest(last time i checked it was between 0.1-0.5%). There is no charge for buying and selling Vanguard funds.
4. Vanguard is non-profit.
~I am no way affiliated with Vanguard.