Enduring investments
A leader in active management and indexing
A leader in active management and indexing
Vanguard offers a wide range of high-quality investments at low cost. We manage the assets of many of our funds in-house. In other cases, we entrust Vanguard fund assets to the best outside managers we can find. In every case, our focus is on long-term performance that helps investors achieve their goals.
Active management: Outperformance by design
Active management: Outperformance by design
Three factors distinguish our approach to active management:
Exceptional talent
Our scale and reputation have attracted some of the world’s best money managers to our team.
Discipline
Our patient approach to active management has enabled outperformance over the long term, despite inevitable interim periods of disappointing results.
Unique client alignment
Because our investors are our owners, we can consistently pass along economies of scale and lower the cost of investing, so our investors keep more of their potential returns.* Our built-in cost advantage also helps our portfolio managers avoid unnecessary investment risks.
A behind-the-scenes look at how we manage active funds.
Video transcript:
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 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, 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.
87%
Share of our actively managed funds that outperformed their average competitors over the last 10 years**
$1.8T
Assets under management
Notes: All data include both mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. The outperformance figure is as of December 31, 2024. The asset figure is as of February 28, 2025. The expense figure reflects operating costs for the funds’ fiscal years that ended in 2023.
Sources: Vanguard and Lipper, a Thomson Reuters Company.
Index fund pioneers
Pioneering index funds
We created the first index fund for retail investors. And we were the first to offer international indexing, small-cap indexing, bond indexing, and emerging markets indexing.
We launched the first index fund for individual investors in 1976, and we've been perfecting our indexing capabilities every day since. Low costs benefit our investors. So does our sophisticated approach to benchmark tracking, which lends performance predictability relative to the markets in which the funds invest.
Meet the people behind our index methodologies.
Video transcript:
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.
82%
0.05%
Average expense ratio, dollar-weighted
Notes: All data include both mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. The outperformance figure is as of December 31, 2024. The expense figure reflects operating costs for the funds’ fiscal years that ended in 2023.
Sources: Vanguard and Lipper, a Thomson Reuters Company.
Learn more about Vanguard investments
Learn more about Vanguard investments
Individuals, institutions, and financial advisors can all benefit from our experience and expertise in both active management and indexing.
Get detailed Vanguard fund information for:
* Vanguard is owned by its funds, which are owned by Vanguard's fund shareholder clients.
** For the ten-year period ended December 31, 2024, 6 of 6 Vanguard money market funds, 40 of 44 bond funds, 5 of 5 balanced funds, and 31 of 39 stock funds, or 82 of 94 Vanguard funds outperformed their peer group averages. Only funds with a minimum ten-year history were included in the comparison. Results for other time periods will vary. Note that the competitive performance data shown represent past performance, which is not a guarantee of future results, and that all investments are subject to risks. For the most recent performance, visit vanguard.com/performance.
Source: Lipper, a Thomson Reuters Company.
*** For the ten-year period ended December 31, 2024, 30 of 53 bond funds, 16 of 18 balanced funds, and 137 of 152 stock funds (in total, 183 of 223 indexed Vanguard funds) outperformed the average returns of their peer groups. Only funds with a minimum ten-year history were included in the comparison. Results for other time periods will vary. Note that the competitive performance data shown represent past performance, which is not a guarantee of future results, and that all investments are subject to risks. For the most recent performance, visit vanguard.com/performance.
Source: Lipper, a Thomson Reuters Company.
Notes:
Vanguard ETF Shares are not redeemable with the issuing fund other than in very large aggregations worth millions of dollars. Instead, investors must buy and sell Vanguard ETF Shares in the secondary market and hold those shares in a brokerage account. In doing so, the investor may incur brokerage commissions and may pay more than net asset value when buying and receive less than net asset value when selling.
All investing is subject to risk, including the possible loss of the money you invest.
Diversification does not ensure a profit or protect against a loss.
