4 ms·

If all vanguard does is buy (not pick) stocks for you, why wouldn't you just skip the fee and buy the stocks yourself?

• nimchimpsky 10y ago
  show me where I can buy stocks for free ? Its cheaper to buy via vanguard.
  • marnett 10y ago
    Robinhood??
    • nabaraz 10y ago
      It's relatively new. They have no site, trading and research tools, investing plans etc. Most of the big brokers offer commission free trades on ETF's and mutual funds.
      • icelancer 10y ago
        Can you name a few that support commission-free trades on ETFs/Mutual Funds for Roth IRA accounts? Can't find one using Google. Thanks.
        • nabaraz 10y ago
          Almost all of the top brokers have some sort of commission-free ETFs/mututal funds. - TDAmeritrade [1] - Schwab [2] [1] - https://research.tdameritrade.com/grid/public/etfs/commissionfree/commissionfree.asp https://research.tdameritrade.com/grid/public/etfs/commissio... [2] - http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/investing/accounts_products/investment/etfs/schwab_etf_onesource http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/investing/accounts_produ...
          • icelancer 10y ago
            Oh, I've seen those. They're a limited selection of ETFs/Mutual Funds though. I thought you were referring to brokers who had unlimited free ETF trading.
        • stevenwoo 10y ago
          Vanguard for Vanguard ETF/Mutual Fund products in a Roth IRA brokerage account.
        • nommm-nommm 10y ago
          Fidelity offers commission free trades on both their ETFs as well as iShares ETFs. If you're only indexing that's all you need. They also have a crap ton of commission free mutual funds, IIRC.
        • tanderson92 10y ago
          Merrill Edge if you have sufficiently high account balance (>$50k) allows 30 free ETF and stock trades per month. There are nice credit card bonuses with BOA CCs, too.
      • solaarphunk 10y ago
        If you are just looking to allocate to some ETFs by Vanguard, there's really no argument left that you need any of these tools. All you are going to do is by SPY or some other ETF and sit on it. Robinhood is very easy for that.
    • matwood 10y ago
      It's not free if you want to skip the T+3 rule by using margin.
• olalonde 10y ago
  To get the equivalent of a total stock market index, you'd need a lot of capital and would spend a lot on trading fees. There are other issues like re-investing dividends, re-balancing, IPOs/bankruptcies, taxes, etc. Also, Vanguard is structured as a mutual company, so fees only pay for costs. The fees are really low too: a 10,000$ investment in VOO (S&P 500 ETF) would only cost you about 5$/year. I actually opened a Vanguard account a few months ago after reading "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Gordon Malkiel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street). I recommend it if you are interested in learning more about investing and ETFs.
• nabaraz 10y ago
  1. Most of the people just want to set their allocation and no think about it more than a few times a year. 2. Without Vanguard(and other index funds), you do not quality for admiral shares. 3. Vanguard's fees are among the lowest(last time i checked it was between 0.1-0.5%). There is no charge for buying and selling Vanguard funds. 4. Vanguard is non-profit. ~I am no way affiliated with Vanguard.
  • bdonlan 10y ago
    Admiral shares are a function of the Vanguard mutual funds themselves; if you're buying the underlying companies directly, "admiral shares" don't matter, since you're not paying management expenses at all.
  • snotrockets 10y ago
    Vanguard isn't a non profit, which is an organization that in contrast to a for-profit company, has no obligation or goal to increase share holder's value. Vanguard is a company like any other for-profit, with the distinction that Vanguard's own shares are being held by the funds it manages, so increasing fees, e.g., would probably decrease share holder's value.
• nicky0 10y ago
  A fund may contain hundreds of stocks/bonds. Would you rather make one transaction or 100? (Bearing in mind most brokers charge a fixed per-transaction fee...)
• zeroer 10y ago
  Tracking indexes and buying and selling stock is not free in time or money. And the fees Vanguard charges for doing so are quite marginal. It probably doesn't make sense to even think about doing something like that until AUM is $10MM+. For more pedestrian account balances, if one wanted a market cap-weighted portfolio, one wouldn't even be able to purchase a single share of a huge swath of companies.