Christopher Alwine: Our roots are really an active management. Going back to 1929 with the launch of the Wellington fund. Today we have over $1.3 trillion in active assets in over 70 US based funds.

Arvind Narayanan: For 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.

Matthew Brancato: Our active funds have outperformed over the last 10 years. We've been able to do that by getting three things right: cost, talent, and patience. We've allowed investors to keep more of their return, we've hired some of the best managers in the world, and we've been patient and allowing that alpha to materialize over a period of time.

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 over reliance 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 sub advised 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, PhDs 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.

Sam Priyadarshi: And a typical day my team is looking at portfolios, and our positions, and how they're trending, how the market is trending, they're monitoring geopolitical events, macro events, movements in the marketplace. It's a very fast paced dynamic and fluid workplace.

Gemma Wright-Casparius: We work in conjunction with the investment strategy team so the economists at Vanguard and we define where we see the spectrum of probabilistic outcomes in the marketplace what's our central view, what's our tail risks up and down from that.

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 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.

Andy Maack: One of the keys of indexing is low costs which Vanguard is able to do with our structure. So everything that we do. The way that we trade, the way that we think, is always aligned to what is best for our shareholders and best for the portfolios.

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 were 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 US 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.