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Comment by ta9000 | Hacker News Reader

Fees on my passive investments there (mostly target date funds) seem to be as low as ever? I don’t care if they offer _more_ options as long as it doesn’t negatively impact their passive business.

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Fair point. My thought is they are clearly spending money on tons of people they wouldn't have to if they were strictly passive. Presumably, if they didn't, the fees would be lower than they are now.

Isn't it equally likely the opposite - your comment presumes that Vanguard is using money from passive to prop up active, whereas it could also be that money from active is already being used to lower fees on passive?

And what happens if active fails? Then passive would take the hit even though people go with Vanguard specifically for the low-risk passive.

> And what happens if active fails? Then passive would take the hit

What specific concern do you have in mind? Are you aware that the corporate structure of Vanguard is that it is the funds who own the company, not the other way around?

https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/corporatesite/us/en/c...

why would the passive funds collapse? or the business?

why would the active funds fail?

if you have 1.1 million in the bank you can afford to take $500 to poker tables

Why should we presume that? It seems equally likely that the fees would have to be higher if not supported by profitable cross-sales.

It's high risk. Sure, if active funds succeed. But active funds fail more often than they succeed.

That’s a risk that Vanguard investors in active funds are willing to take. They’re not stupid, investors at Vanguard know that passive is their primary focus. Also the fees for their active funds are lower than average so they have a higher likelihood of success since a lot of the drag on active performance is… high fees.

3 bps instead of 4? That’s a savings of… $100 on a million annually.

I mean even $100 annually compounds to be tens of thousands over a lifetime. Furthermore, Vanguard manages like almost 10 trillion so that ends up being nearly a billion extra extracted per year.

My main issue though is that Vanguard's brand is low-risk passive, but they are now selling high-risk active funds under that brand.

You aren't wrong that Vanguard seems more active friendly these days.

But Vanguard under Bogle always played both sides of the fence at least to some extent. They have always had that actively managed Windsor fund, right? And Wellington?

I think your article headline shows you have a fair bit more to learn about Bogle. Or at least you haven't made your case on that front. Bogle was at least as much about low cost and aligning interests of the investment client as he was about passive indexing, though he is known more for the latter.

Here's a writeup with a couple pointers to more on the topic from Bogle: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=388377

Vanguard's brand is "retirement management company." If you were to ask the vast majority of people with their retirement accounts managed by Vanguard who Jack Bogle was very few would be able to answer.

Quibbling over one basis point in fees just doesn't feel valuable. Tracking error will be larger than this.

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