Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, zero means a 0% expense ratio and no minimums, as listed for the four funds at the top of https://www.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/investing-ideas/index-... . Unlike most other funds, these are captive to Fidelity so if you ever do an ACATS transfer they have to be liquidated.
That's the key, though if it's a tax-advantaged account it's not a major issue (as you can just transfer to an appropriate ETF and then ACATS that). In taxable it could cause you to have to stay with Fidelity or eat a tax bill.
Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
111–120 of 279 posts
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
We tried using vanguard. The UX/UI was so bad we went through the work of transferring everything to fidelity. They've got a pretty decent app. Vanguard has so much friction on what should be very simple and common tasks. There's no excuse for that. I can say pretty confidently that cutting fees won't be enough. They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff, and they probably need to r…
The idea of making financial decisions based on UI/UX is extraordinary to me.
It took me MONTHS to figure out how to sell a particular fund to buy another one. Somehow every time I tried to do it, it failed. I kept coming back to it over and over and different things went wrong. It was also very difficult to figure out the status of an order.
It was literally that clunky, and I've been trading for decades. I run multiple businesses, I know how these things work, but their UI was awful.
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH, I trust vanguard more, even if their website is absolutely worse. There's a saying, 'if you're not the customer, you're the product'. I expect trades on those index funds are getting 'front run' much like robinhood is getting front run. You might have a lower ER but your nav might effectively be higher when buying and lower when selling. Of course, I'm a 'buy and hold' investor so this doesn't really effect me m…
Fidelity uses those funds as marketing, and they make up for it with all the other services and funds they offer. It's intentional, and it's working. Vanguard is more and more becoming a group that just wants to run ETFs and if you want to use them, they're making it harder and harder. They recently dumped all their 401(k) and similar plans from being in-house to some other provider. Saves costs, makes support annoyi…
Which I would highly recommend if you ever want to change brokers. the fidelity ZERO products are great but can only be held at fidelity while VOO shares can be transfered to any broker.
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to hold the fund on the ex-dividend date... Pays out once in Dec. If you buy in Feb and sell in Oct, you're not getting your dividend although you earned most of it... If you had VTI, you'd get 3 of them.
Dividends are built into the NAV price. It just becomes taxable income when it is paid out.
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
We tried using vanguard. The UX/UI was so bad we went through the work of transferring everything to fidelity. They've got a pretty decent app. Vanguard has so much friction on what should be very simple and common tasks. There's no excuse for that. I can say pretty confidently that cutting fees won't be enough. They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff, and they probably need to r…
Vanguard recently made two horrible mistakes: 1. a typical "Grand UI Redesign" that made the site worse and removed a bunch of previously working features, and 2. They made all their users "migrate" their accounts from one type to another, a process that I found to be error prone and clunky. For 1, all of us software people have seen companies do this over and over, and it always sucks. For 2, why they couldn't do wh…
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH, I trust vanguard more, even if their website is absolutely worse. There's a saying, 'if you're not the customer, you're the product'. I expect trades on those index funds are getting 'front run' much like robinhood is getting front run. You might have a lower ER but your nav might effectively be higher when buying and lower when selling. Of course, I'm a 'buy and hold' investor so this doesn't really effect me m…
Fidelity uses those funds as marketing, and they make up for it with all the other services and funds they offer. It's intentional, and it's working. Vanguard is more and more becoming a group that just wants to run ETFs and if you want to use them, they're making it harder and harder. They recently dumped all their 401(k) and similar plans from being in-house to some other provider. Saves costs, makes support annoyi…
> Vanguard is more and more becoming a group that just wants to run ETFs and if you want to use them, they're making it harder and harder. They recently dumped all their 401(k) and similar plans from being in-house to some other provider.
If this is true, then it must for individuals.. My company moved a little over a year ago TO vanguard for 401ks
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
We tried using vanguard. The UX/UI was so bad we went through the work of transferring everything to fidelity. They've got a pretty decent app. Vanguard has so much friction on what should be very simple and common tasks. There's no excuse for that. I can say pretty confidently that cutting fees won't be enough. They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff, and they probably need to r…
That's because Vanguard is a buy and hold philosophy. They have previously stated that they designed their site for the bulk of the users. Those users log in just to check their balances in the 5 or fewer funds/ETFs that they hold. So instead of building something that would be reasonably easy for everyone, they built something that was easy for their primary (aging) user base. It's the same sort of mentality how the…
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#118Not mentioned in any of the coverage I've seen (or the interview with Vanguard's new CEO in the WSJ) is Fidelity. Fidelity used to be known for actively managed funds, but has been eating Vanguard's indexing lunch for the past 10 years or so. Part of this relates to its dominance in workplace accounts, but Vanguard hasn't helped itself with some bad customer-facing software updates and a perception that its service l…
We tried using vanguard. The UX/UI was so bad we went through the work of transferring everything to fidelity. They've got a pretty decent app. Vanguard has so much friction on what should be very simple and common tasks. There's no excuse for that. I can say pretty confidently that cutting fees won't be enough. They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff, and they probably need to r…
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
PFOF is neither front running nor illegal. If you are curious about a brokers position on PFOF you can look up their disclosures. SEC Rule 605, 606 and 615 are the search terms you want when looking these up. Fidelity has a similar disclosure on this as Vsnguard, which is that they don’t engage in PFOF except for some options markets. Robinhood got in trouble for false advertising about PFOF not because they engaged…
PFOF isn't (typically) illegal, a better word might be "controversial". There's nothing free in this life: the zero commission brokers are making it up somehow. While the studies on how PFOF effects execution quality are varied, this summary [1] from Wharton seems fairly balanced. It's not as simple as citing NBBO and moving on. Personally I'm suspicious of the practice mostly because of the pretty clear conflicts of…
Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
#120Not mentioned in any of the coverage I've seen (or the interview with Vanguard's new CEO in the WSJ) is Fidelity. Fidelity used to be known for actively managed funds, but has been eating Vanguard's indexing lunch for the past 10 years or so. Part of this relates to its dominance in workplace accounts, but Vanguard hasn't helped itself with some bad customer-facing software updates and a perception that its service l…
We tried using vanguard. The UX/UI was so bad we went through the work of transferring everything to fidelity. They've got a pretty decent app. Vanguard has so much friction on what should be very simple and common tasks. There's no excuse for that. I can say pretty confidently that cutting fees won't be enough. They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff, and they probably need to r…
This is an example of not breaking what was not broken (or at least, keep most of what was useful instead of replacing everything with "new and cool" stuff just because ).