Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

But does that structure confer any realistic chance of voting control by any real humans who aren't already employed by vanguard?

Funds aren't known for being voting activists.

This is academic. I have equal control over both, which is to say none whatsoever. Capacity to influence a company falls to the following (in order)

1. Executives

2. Large shareholders (usually institutional and rarely individuals)

3. Customers

4. Employee unions (if present)

The tech industry is an anomaly where 1 and 2 largely overlap, but this is not true in most industries. Unless you are super rich, you will never be able to have more influence over a large company than you do in the role of a pissed off customer ready to take his money elsewhere.

This alone is why I will always choose Vanguard if possible.

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 annoying.

Of course, you can use a Fidelity account to own Vanguard ETFs if you wanted.

There’s not really much money to be made front running someone’s deposit into an index fund that’s gonna sit there for the next 40 years. It works on RH because generally those users are transacting much more frequently and in much less liquid things like options.

I trust Fidelity. I used to work there years ago. It is a conservatively run place, careful with changes, which is a good thing when managing large amount of money. The tech and web interface might not be the shiniest, but I'd rather have my money there than vanguard/schwab, etc...

How do you front run a mutual fund? The price is the price.

Front running is illegal.

I trusted Vanguard more until they became a broker and forced all their fund customers to have a brokerage account with them.

The pennies that they scalp off you on the trade by "front running" the order is much less cost than the annual fee if you are a long term investor.

You expect wrong. I think you're talking about Payment for Order Flow (PFOF) which Fidelity does not use.[0]

[0] https://www.fidelity.com/trading/execution-quality/overview

They only offered it for a month or 2 and pulled it pretty quick

The overpriced junk is wedged into bespoke employer 401k programs that are managed by the brokers. There is usually only one or two low fee options hiding in the list and you have to be savvy to find them. Most employer 401k programs suck because they (custodian) are agreeing to the fund composition based on price to them. If you are lucky you might not end up in John Hancock or Transamerica. Yuck!

It's interesting everyone's saying the UX is bad. I've had consistently good interactions with Vanguard's support over the years. I regularly get to talk to an actual human without waiting more than 10-20 minutes, and they're very helpful about getting things done and giving even basic advice about tradeoffs in different investing options.

The website isn't amazing, but I don't feel like it's terrible either. There's much worse 401k/IRA providers out there.

Fidelity has great features, but is hamstrung by their awful execution.

The app is clunky, slow, and looks like something from the 90s. Just logging in takes an average of 10-15 seconds. The credit card is serviced by Elan, who is awful, but aside from that, the UX is abysmal. It feels like it redirects no less than 8 times to get to the credit card page. My phone won't even load it, so I have to do it on my computer.

It's so frustrating to me because I feel like they're 90% of the way there and just need a bit of UX work. But I've had that feeling for years now, with no real progress made, so am slowly moving away. If you don't touch your money often, it's probably fine - great even, but it became too frustrating for me in the end as an everyday use account.

You can. There's usually a hefty transaction fee when purchasing a funds not managed by whichever service you're on ($49?).

Might be manageable if you're purchasing in enormous quantities; but a 5% fee on $1000 hurts if you're in normal consumer purchase ranges.

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 whatever backend migration they needed to do without having it disrupting retail customers, I have no idea.

Both of those point to a software organization way below where it needs to be competence-wise.

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 they don't allow inverse ETFs, they aren't going to offer any crypto related stuff, etc.

> They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff,

They've done that. And now you can't sort by capital gain/loss per share when picking lots to sell.

They're also almost done forcing everyone into the brokerage side, which is less flexible with some things like reinvestment of dividends. On the nice side, it includes foreign dividend info on the 1099s so you don't have to find a separate document to get those percentages.

The idea of making financial decisions based on UI/UX is extraordinary to me.

Vanguard's website revamp in the past three years was disappointing because in the past, I can visit just one (landing) page and get almost all of the info I need about my holdings + actions I could take on them and my accounts. Now, I have to click through a myriad of pages to do what I want. Plus, in Firefox browser at least, if you want to 'Exit' the order and some other pages, it simply doesn't work, so I have to type the 'vanguard.com' in the browser's URL field and ping it again.

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 <no reason?>).

It's so bad. I don't even like logging in anymore. Padding/whitespace everywhere, no more alternating row colors. I despise mobile-first UIs. The old one many have looked dated but it was more information dense without being overwhelming.

Sure but that’s an order of magnitude above the numbers the parent is comparing? A 7% fee is certainly crazy, agreed with you there

2% over 30 years is inconsequential. At an average rate of 7%, that mean you'll grow your investment by 759% over 30 years instead of 761%.

That is the average. Many of them are just 0.03% or 0.04%

... of the original value, ignoring growth, dividends, and inflation.

The counter is smaller returns are easier for small investors. If you are a large investor just the act of buying stock changes the price.

I wonder what 20,000 Employees are doing there though. I know saying "I could do that with 10 people, what are they even doing" is a meme here, but I really can't make a good guess what the employees are actually doing. Risk assessment, looking for new investment opportunities, regulatory paperwork, marketing? 20,000 is a lot of people.

VWRA (all world UCITS) probably the more famous one charging 0.22%, while the closest corresponding US ETF VT (total world) is just 0.06% (dropped from 0.07%)

FTSE All-World UCITS ETF (VWRP) has 0.22%

Lots of small reductions to the specialty bond funds. VCIT and BIV (Intermediate Term bonds) moving from from 0.04% ==> 0.03%. One notable drop is with VWOB (Emerging Markets Government Bond) going from 0.15% to 0.1%.

Rule of legal journalism: never link a PDF to the actual court opinion/decision . . .

4-5%

A mix. For a given asset class I look at expense ratios and underlying indexes.

Individually we don't have significant shares, but aggregate it up to BlackRock / Vanguard level, then there is real influence. What is that influence worth? that influence given to the fund manager should be priced correctly. I agree, you probably dont want to have to vote on 500 companies, but to start with it should be an "opt out" decision if you don't care. Alternatively you could allocate your votes to a proxy entity that aggregates like minded investors votes.

> Having voting rights kind of goes against the point of tracking an index though.

Not sure I follow how voting rights goes against the point of tracking an index? I'd say the value of the index implicitly prices in the value of the voting rights in the constituents. So if your index does not contain the voting rights, should the index price not be different?

> And for funds that use synthetic replication there is nothing to vote on in the first place.

There are all kinds of funds, of course when it's 100% synthetic then so be it. But if it holds a representitive sample of Russell 3000, then those votes count.