Vanguard announced today that they are eliminating trading fees on stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds. They sent out the info in an email to customers today. The move puts Vanguard in line with many other brokerages who’ve recently announced getting rid of trade fees.
Buying Vanguard’s own funds never had a fee, and now they are removing fees from the purchase of other stocks and funds as well. Options trading will still cost $1 per contract.
yes yes yes i been waiting for this. i almost opened a roth account with schwab, but def sticking with vanguard now
Too bad Vanguard is a god awful brokerage house with one of the absolute worst websites. Best to own their products elsewhere IMO.
What makes their site so poor?
Go use their site and then compare it to Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, or Schwab and then you’ll know.
Well that’s a cop-out of an answer if I’ve ever seen one.
True, but he’s not wrong. The look & feels is from the early 2000s and getting anything done takes 2-3 more clicks than necessary.
Not exactly. Vanguard was mainly built on their own funds, buy & hold investment philosophy, & institutional accounts, so it’s UX/UI is not really set up to be traders platform, have extensive research notes, comparison tools etc.
@Jags That’s just your opinion. There’s no real basis for it, in my experience.
IMO love vanguard. most certainly my preference but yes…interface leaves much to be desired, period. However, I relish not paying for a better one 😉
Most brokerages went free due to Robinhood, how are the app experiences compared?
Their website and app are being updated too, per this announcement.
should have read further! ;( hope its all inclusive! lol
Meh, the app is decent enough for a buy-and-hold portfolio.
They fired a huge part of their brokerage dept some years back…
I am fine with it… They don’t want frequent traders.
Vanguard has been the best ETF brokerage firm in my opinion, ultra low costs. Adding this makes it that much better.
How do they make money? Just curious
1. When they take incoming money in or send money out, it usually takes 1 day to settle – same thing that paypal does. 2. Their money markets and mutual funds have expense ratios, so 1.00% expense ratio means they are making $100 for every $10,000 you have with them.
They manage over $5 trillion, so even charging very low expense ratios add up. The management expenses are around .25 for most funds. They operate at at-cost (no profit)
Expense ratios. 0.1% of $5T is $5B (not sure of exact numbers). That pays expenses, as they don’t make profit.
This is how: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/your-money/free-stock-trading.html
For such a low-cost pioneer, it took them long enough.
They had free ETFs long before almost everyone else.
Also their model is “at cost”, not free. Free stuff can push expenses to other customers.
Of course; but as long as I’m not one of those “other customers,” it can be better elsewhere.
My point is that for the for-profit companies, free stuff can be loss leaders and they can make up for it with other profitable products/services. But Vanguard is non profit. They run at cost. Any extra savings or costs go (plus or minus) to the customers. Any new free stuff can cost the customers (e.g. owners of the funds), though I’m guessing the cost is minimal.
They don’t have any “free” ETFs — they had a commission-free list of ETFs (mostly their own).
Their ETFs are very low cost, but not the same thing as free.
Oh come on, it’s obvious from the context we were talking about zero commission for ETFs.
Also you are totally wrong that Vanguard merely “had a commission-free list of ETFs (mostly their own).” They went to zero commission for ALL ETFs long before all the others.
Still paying zero corporate tax.
Due to how they are structured, they better not..
The horde of lawyers they park in D.C. has nothing to do with it.