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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 9350151" data-attributes="member: 7025997">A little bit of backstory:Vanguard, specifically founder Jack Bogle, was the originators of the index fund. Those things where you buy one of every stock in the S&P 500 to diversify? Yeah, that was them back in 1975 with the First Index Investment Trust. They were famous for having the lowest fees in the industry, which is relevant when you're expecting compound interest to grow your retirement account over the years. (Companies would charge huge active management fees, significantly decreasing your stake.) Bogle famously died a millionaire rather than a billionaire like the owners of equivalent firms.Supposedly it's owned by the funds themselves, rather than an investment company as in the case of their major competitors, making it ironically, in some senses, a form of socialism, despite it owning a not-insignificant portion of Corporate America at this point. The index fund strategy was so far superior to active management for just about anyone not named Warren Buffett that something like a third of the market is now owned by index funds. Indeed, the largest shareholder in Hasbro is Vanguard, at 11%. A lot of that is probably average folks and pension funds parking their assets in index funds.They've done a few things since then to hold their costs down, like a unique asset structure to decrease the tax burden on ETFs for customers, and have been one of the major drivers to lower fees in the investment industry (which as mentioned used to be a huge cost for the retail investor, i.e. you and me). The company's done a few questionable things since then, such as a ownership-class swap that stuck customers with a bunch of surprise taxes (<a href="https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/lessons-vanguard-target-dates-capital-gains-surprise" target="_blank">Lessons From Vanguard Target-Date’s Capital Gains Surprise</a>). (The whole rigmarole is extremely complex but the lesson here is not to hold target-date funds in a taxable account.) Customer service is famously slow (perhaps due to the desire to keep fees down).  Vanguard is supposed to be the place you go to shove your excess dough and forget about it until retirement, though apparently now they'll be taking some of it too.FWIW Blackrock was rather recently buying up a lot of the single-family homes in the US and selling them to real-estate companies, so it's not like their competitors are that pure either.And if you're too poor to have significant investments, this is hardly relevant.</blockquote>

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