The Vanguard investment story

Matthew Brancato: An enduring investment idea is one that over the long term improves the chances that an investor will be able to realize their goals. It's good to just start and think about what it is that makes a product enduring in nature and how that separates from the idea of a fad.

Molly Concannon: The questions we ask when launching a product are: One, is there an enduring investment merit? We want to launch products that have proven to have, and if there's economic rationale for, real returns. Two, we look at our business strategy. Three, we look at the needs and preferences of our clients. And four, we look at our investment capabilities.

Matthew Brancato: One of the areas that we spend a lot of time on is the existing product lineup. So we're not always looking for the next big thing that we think is going to generate a lot of profitability for the firm because that's not how we're organized. That's not who we are.

So from a philosophical standpoint, we really try to keep client needs and preferences at the center of product design, and we carry that all the way through how we steward assets in the context of the ongoing management of our product lineup.

There are aspects of our product lineup that have not changed and will not change. Things like diversification, low cost, focus on the long term—areas like that are really core to who we are and will not change.

Molly Concannon: It's what will make our client successful. And given Vanguard structure and our alignments with clients, if our clients are successful, that will make Vanguard successful. That's a real differentiator when you compare Vanguard to competitors. 

Arvind Narayanan: Our active fixed income process at Vanguard is really built around three key tenets. First, having a long-term perspective. Second, is to have diversified sources of alpha, where we're not reliant on a single market risk factor to drive returns in the portfolio. And third, is to have a disciplined approach to risk taking, where our cost advantage gives us that benefit and allows us to be patient and take risk in the market only when the opportunities are there.

Sara Devereux: Our active edge in fixed income investing revolves around compounding alpha. We focus on a diversified set of reliable strategies that are repeatable and scalable, and we don't have an overreliance on large macro bets. In addition, we have a differentiated risk framework that is strengthened by our low fees. This gives us the breathing room to take risk up and down according to the opportunity set and ultimately results in the best risk-adjusted returns over time.

Kaitlyn Caughlin: We complement our internal approach with external partnerships. Many investors don't realize the depth of our subadvised active franchise where we actually can complement our internal expertise with expertise that's built in many other firms around the world.

John Ameriks: A lot of the rigor comes in, in the debates that we have–a lot of people with very strong academic backgrounds, Ph.D.s in finance, economics, mathematics, a couple of physicists thrown in as well, who bring a variety of different lenses to analyzing whether a model is well-designed, whether it's fit for purpose, and how it fits into all of the pieces of the process.

Christopher Alwine: Successful investing requires a long-term perspective as well as a disciplined approach. So you're going to see a very collaborative environment with a very focused team looking to drive value into the portfolios by identifying those opportunities that make sense to implement.

John Ameriks: We're looking to try to find an insight that others may find harder to uncover or may be not patient enough to take advantage of, and that takes just an awful lot of work and focus and rigor to get right.

Rodney Comegys: Vanguard's been doing indexing since the mid-1970s. Really Mr. Bogle (Vanguard founder John C. Bogle) made the first index fund for retail investors. From there, we've taken and expanded it. We were the first to offer international indexing, small caps, small company indexing, bond indexing, and emerging markets indexing.

Michelle Louie: We manage our entire book of business together as a team. What you'll see is a lot of conversations happening on the floor in real time talking about what is going on in the markets, what's going on in our portfolios, what types of complex actions we're trading. So I think the camaraderie and how we work together on the team and with our partners on the floor is actually one of the key ingredients to our clients having a great experience with us.

Andy Maack: Behind me are 25 portfolio managers and traders that are trading on behalf of our index portfolios. We have a domestic team that handles our domestic portfolios as well as an international team that handles the trading portfolio management for our global portfolios. We have traders and portfolio managers all around the globe.

Our portfolio managers here in the U.S. will pass their orders to the different regions to take advantage of liquidity and also have subject matter experts that are Vanguard traders in those regions handling those orders. This allows us to really understand the markets as well as what strategies are best to implement in those markets to make sure we're adding value for our shareholders.

Michelle Louie: We use a combination of value-added proprietary trading strategies, but we marry them with an approach that is hyper-focused on cost. So every decision I make for our investors' portfolios, I always trade off what is the cost of doing this?

Rodney Comegys: We've worked tirelessly over the years on execution, basically making sure when we have to buy securities we do so at the best price possible for our investors at the lowest possible execution costs. We partner with our index providers and use blockchain as our enabler. It's effectively the engine that lets us communicate and exchange data between ourselves and our index providers and we found that to be a real improvement when it comes to both speed and quality of data.

Michelle Louie: When we look to measure Vanguard index fund performance, we try to trade off essentially three main things. So the first thing we try to look at is tracking error of the risks that we take. The second thing we look to balance alongside risk is cost. And then the third thing that we try to trade off with those other two typically is tax efficiencies.

We are like people sweeping up pennies on the floor. We care about every fraction of a penny every penny we can get, because we believe that that's money that belongs to our investors.

Kaitlyn Caughlin: Vanguard has a very unique approach to investment management that has been built over a 40-year history around the global market. And we really define our investment management approach in three key ways. One, we have deep expertise. Two, we take a disciplined approach to risk taking. And three, we have global presence and perspectives. All of which join together to a proven investment approach that delivers value and outcomes for our clients, day in and day out.

We actually have over 400 investment professionals in our investment portfolio management teams, but we don't stop there. We look outside, too, to ensure we're really drawing in the very best talent around the world. And it's a bit different than our competitors. We actually are not reliant on just our internal pool of talent. We do both.

Joseph Davis: There's two primary benefits of having global expertise and how that benefits our clients. One is just the power of diversity of teams because any two individuals can approach a problem from a different angle. And so you have individuals who live in different countries, different educational backgrounds, from different cultures, that in of itself is an asset. Secondly is the power of global expertise to go deep on an issue.

And so there are issues increasingly in the global economy and the financial markets where news from Asia or for Europe can have significant ramifications even for the U.S. market. That's more so today than it ever was in the recent past. And so having local experts in the market that are communicating with each other leads to better answers, and I think it gives us a differentiated edge in the marketplace.

Kaitlyn Caughlin: Disciplined risk-taking has been part of who Vanguard is from the very beginning. From Mr. Bogle's era (Vanguard founder John C. Bogle).

Joseph Davis: Our risk management approach is very disciplined. And what I mean by that is really trying to focus to outperform a benchmark or to align a fund's performance to its investment strategy in a very coherent and very clear way. And so I think our approach to risk management does not mean that we're infallible. I think what it does though, it focuses the portfolio management teams on adding a level of return commensurate with the risks. And so not being afraid to ask questions and looking deeper internally, I think, gives us an edge in the portfolio management business.

Kaitlyn Caughlin: We really think those three things–deep expertise, disciplined risk-taking, and a global presence and perspective is a differentiated approach for our investors and drives value for the market and for our individual clients.