Vanguard is the world's largest mutual-fund and exchange-traded-fund manager, headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, a town 45 minutes north-west of Philadelphia. It was founded by Jack Bogle in 1975 and launched the first index-tracking funds for ordinary savers soon after. It manages $10trn in assets.
Vanguard is a kind of co-operative, owned by its funds, which are in turn owned by their investors. Rather than raising the value of the company, it focuses on driving down fees, forcing the rest of the industry to follow suit. This downward ratchet is known as the "Vanguard effect" and is estimated to have saved investors trillions of dollars since the firm's inception. On February 3rd 2025 Vanguard announced it would trim its average fee from 0.07% to 0.06%; BlackRock's share price fell by 5% on the same day.
Employees are referred to as "crew", owing to Bogle's obsession with the Royal Navy. The canteen is "the galley". Campus buildings are named after ships of the Napoleonic Wars: Defence, Goliath and Orion, among them. The firm itself is named after Horatio Nelson's flagship.
Vanguard hosts 28% of American mutual-fund and ETF assets, a share that has climbed by seven percentage points in a decade. In America it boasts as many assets as BlackRock, Fidelity and State Street combined. It manages both the world's largest mutual fund and its largest ETF. In 2025 it attracted 29% of American ETF inflows and 41% of those into stockmarket funds. Despite its dominance in assets, Athanasios Psarofagis of Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that the firm accounted for just 9% of American ETF revenues, far behind BlackRock's 28%, because of its low fees.
Salim Ramji became boss in 2024, having joined from BlackRock where he oversaw index investments. He is the first outsider to have led Vanguard. He aims to apply what he calls the "industrial logic" of Vanguard more thoroughly in advice, bonds, wealth management and private markets.
All six ETFs Vanguard launched in America in 2025 are bond funds. Ramji argues that the fixed-income market is twice the size of the equity market, far more inefficient and far less understood. In January 2025 it established a separate advice and wealth-management division overseeing a little under $1trn. The median Vanguard client has assets with the firm of under $100,000.
In 2024 Vanguard estimated that 64% of Americans' pension-pot contributions went into "target-date" funds, which split their portfolios between stocks and bonds in proportions determined by the dates when savers hope to retire rather than by market prices.
In April 2025 Vanguard announced a tie-up with Blackstone and Wellington, an asset-management firm. A month later the trio announced an "all-markets fund" blending public and private assets. The move into private markets is controversial among purist followers of Bogle, known as Bogleheads, who regard higher fees as a drag on returns.
Vanguard has a new technology-development office in Hyderabad, India, and plans to introduce AI-based client assistance.
Vanguard left the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative in 2022, more than two years before BlackRock and many rivals. It nevertheless faces a court case in Texas, filed by the state's Republican attorney-general and supported by a dozen other states, along with BlackRock and State Street, accusing the three firms of colluding to reduce production by coal miners.
Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.