Vanguard vs. others

[FIRE'd@51]

The vast majority of my assets are with Vanguard, but I use both for brokerage in order to trade options. Fidelity's options trading platform is much superior to Vanguard's, and Fidelity will allow certain trades that Vanguard won't. If you are a Flagship client, Vanguard's commisions are lower on stocks, ETF's, and smaller options trades.

 

[photoguy]

I have most of our portfolio at vanguard (60%), followed by fidelity (20%) and insignificant amount at schwab. Trading vanguard funds at fidelity is costly (don't know about schwab).

The way I think about this is that vanguard is the most dedicated to reduced fees and indexing. In my opinion, they will likely still have the lowest fees in 10, 20, and 30 years from now as well as the broadest choices.

While Fidelity and Schwab might have some funds that are currently competitive or even lower than vanguard, I'm deciding based on who I think will be best in the long term.

I do have significant money in spartan funds and ishares (at vanguard). My concern with these funds is that the managers will let the expense ratio drift up over time (or not reduce them as much as the competition) and it would be costly to switch out.

 

[Which Roger]

Unless something has changed recently, Vanguard has a better selection of index mutual funds available.

+1. The Vanguard indices are broader than most index funds offered by other companies. You can put together the 3-fund portfolio consisting of total stock market + total bond market + total international, rebalance periodically, and forget about it otherwise. Not sure if this is possible with any other mutual fund company.

 

[CaliforniaMan]

I don't use Fidelity. But the reasons are emotional rather than logical. I used to have funds in Fidelity before I discovered Vanguard, even in their famous Magellan fund in the 80s, and had some state retirement funds there as well.

But Fidelity started out as a very high load and high expense fund family. IMO they would still be that way today if it were not for Vanguard and because of people like me switching and forcing them to realize they had to change or decline. I also like Schwab for the rare trading I do and for their banking.

If it were not for John Bogle and Vanguard we might still be paying those high fees today. As far as I recall Vanguard was the only player trying to actually reduce fees.

As I said, emotional.

 

[2B]

I'm wondering about the poor customer service comments about Vanguard. They have answered every question I've had and made transfer of funds go smoothly. Almost a decade ago DW and I had no money with Vanguard. We were desperately looking for a brokerage account that would let DW set up a custodial account for her father who had been diagnosed with Alzheimers. He had a hodge podge of small accounts at high fee locations or at banks. Vanguard let us set up a custodial account and it functioned without problems the rest of his life. When the great split came when his estate was settled. DW moved half of the account into SILs account and half into ours. Quick and easy.

Because of their help through this period, it seemed a no brainer to consolidate our accounts there since I had been buying Vanguard ETFs through my ETrade account. We quickly became Flagship which I realize gets a higher level of support but I really haven't noticed a difference.

 

[Cobra9777]

I mainly own Vanguard and iShares index ETFs, and I house it all at Fidelity. I'm quite happy with that arrangement, which resulted from quite a bit of research and trial-and-error over the years.

 

[GTFan]

I've also had no issues with the maybe 2 times I've called Vanguard in the last 25 years+ that I've had funds there, and don't anticipate needing to call them for much of anything in the next 25. As mentioned above, low cost and broad selection of indexes is way more important to me than customer service as you can do almost everything online.

I do like Fidelity's tools on the web however and am happy to hold roughly 50/50 between them and Vanguard (most of the Fido stuff in a 401k courtesy of my former MegaCorp employer). I've never had to call Fido for anything and when I set up a BrokerageLink account for my 401k in the mail it was done very quickly by them.

 

[Mulligan]

I'm wondering about the poor customer service comments about Vanguard. They have answered every question I've had and made transfer of funds go smoothly. Almost a decade ago DW and I had no money with Vanguard. We were desperately looking for a brokerage account that would let DW set up a custodial account for her father who had been diagnosed with Alzheimers. He had a hodge podge of small accounts at high fee locations or at banks. Vanguard let us set up a custodial account and it functioned without problems the rest of his life. When the great split came when his estate was settled. DW moved half of the account into SILs account and half into ours. Quick and easy.

Because of their help through this period, it seemed a no brainer to consolidate our accounts there since I had been buying Vanguard ETFs through my ETrade account. We quickly became Flagship which I realize gets a higher level of support but I really haven't noticed a difference.

I have found most encounters with the reps to be very helpful. Though I had one curious encounter with an "income specialist" when I had to call in an order that couldn't be bought online. He kept cautioning on buying the security I wanted because it had a negative 25% 30 day to call return. I couldn't get him to understand that was meaningless as the next dividend was officially declared by BoD and I could not lose a penny on any call down the road.


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