Show HN: StockNerd – A community for index fund investors

Re:Show HN: StockNerd – A community for index fund investors by jjeaff on Friday June 02, 2017 @01:06PM (#14471505)

The one advantage of Vanguard is that the company itself is owned by its funds. So the very people who pay the admin fees are the ones who vote the leadership in or out. So raising fees would be unlikely unless necessary and they are known to be very frugal as a company as well so I feel like they are unlikely to need more fees. Especially with almost $3 Trillion under management.

Of course, there isn't any real cost to switching. So you could always switch to Schwab or vice versa as needed.

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Re:Show HN: StockNerd – A community for index fund investors by kcorbitt on Friday June 02, 2017 @02:21PM (#14472190)

There isn't a large cost to switching brokerages and keeping the same funds (although it's a pain and some places do claw back $50 or so on the way out the door), but there could be a major cost to switching funds within your brokerage, eg. switching from SCHB to VTI. If you're not in a tax-deferred account, that switch will cause you to realize capital gains and pay a 15% tax at the moment of sale.

That's why I prefer to stick with Vanguard: like you explained, fund holders are their corporate owners and they're supremely unincentivized to perform a bait and switch. Schwab, on the other hand, could decide to raise admin fees 10 basis points tomorrow if they decided the revenue justified the increased churn.

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