I've also been a customer for over 10 years, and recently moved everything to Fidelity purely based on convenience. As far as I can tell, Fidelity is better equipped to be a full bank replacement (consolidating my various accounts held in various places & opening a brokerage line-of-credit).

This blog post, along with the fact that Vanguard is the only one of my accounts that immediately transferred my funds with no bullshit slow-walking the move, trying to keep them (looking at you, Schwab & E-Trade!), makes me sort of regret that transfer. I want to support companies like Vanguard!

The general consensus is Vanguard is amazing for how they revolutionized investing with index funds, its ownership model really does put investors first, but as a brokerage, it has quality-of-life issues with its website and apps. Spending an extra $10M per year on designers and UI engineers would change the game for them.

Vanguard is owned by its investors/customers which is you.

Aligned incentives at their best.

People still need to make executive decisions.

And frankly, I suspect a lot of Vanguard customers DID want crypto. There are greater objectives at stake, and so I am glad Vanguard held the line.

I'm not utterly opposed to a possible future scenario for certain cryptocurrencies maturing into a more integral asset to the economy. But we ain't there yet, and their current volatility and novelty should not be promoted under the Vanguard reputation.

And assets in hedge funds are owned by investors, yet the shady games they play with that money…

Good financial managers decide how a portfolio gets managed.

At Vanguard, not only are the assets owned by the shareholders. The manager itself is owned by the funds, and therefore by the shareholders.

That's not the case for a typical hedge fund.

That creates some interesting situations like charging too little:

“VGI provides services to the Funds “at cost”, i.e., without charging an arm’s length profit. VGI is a C corporation and the Funds are Regulated Investment Companies (RICs) not taxable at the corporate level, so this situation results in avoidance of billions of corporate taxes.”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2666426

I left Vanguard over their decision to restrict investments into Bitcoin and moved to Fidelity. I view investment platforms as tools to express and communicate my investing theses. I do not want to be censored and unable to express my investment theses by a paternal company that “knows better” than me.

Same. I own a mix of ETFs, some from Vanguard and some not. I will be even more inclined to buy Vanguard ETFs going forward.

I am so, so tired of trying to explain to my retired mother why she should not buy any more bitcoin … with money that she really cannot afford to lose.

Are you willing to live with the fact that you may be wrong and she’s right?

Perfectly willing, yes. I believe in making decisions for the right reasons regardless of the eventual outcome.

I wouldn’t support her putting her retirement savings all on black either, even though she might win plenty.