What are Vanguard's Admiral Shares?
"Vanguard's Admiral shares are like regular (""investor"") shares in their funds, only they charge lower expense ratios. They have higher investment minimums, though. (For instance, the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund has a minimum of $3,000 and an expense ratio of .18% for the Investor Shares class, but a minimum of $10,000 and an expense ratio of .07% for Admiral Shares). If you've bought a bunch of investor shares and now meet the (recently-reduced) minimum for Admiral shares, or if you have some and buy some more investor shares in the future and meet the minimums, you will qualify for a free, no-tax-impact conversion to the Admiral Shares and save yourself some money. For more information, see the Vanguard article on their recent changes to Admiral Shares minimums. Vanguard also offers institutional-class shares with even lower expense ratios than that (with a minimum of $5 million, .06% expense ratios on the same fund). A lot of the costs of operating a fund are per-individual, so they don't need to charge you extra fees for putting in more money after a certain point. They'd rather be competitive and offer it at cost. Vanguard's funds typically have very low expense ratios to begin with. (The investor shares I've been using as an example are advertised as ""84% lower than the average expense ratio of funds with similar holdings"".) In fact, Vanguard's whole reason for existing is the premise (stated in founder John C Bogle's undergraduate thesis at Princeton) that individuals can generally get better returns by investing in a cheap fund that tracks an index than by investing in mutual funds that try to pick stocks and beat the index and charge you a steep markup. The average real return of the stock market is supposedly something like 4%; even a small-looking percentage like 1% can eat a big portion of that. Over the course of 40 years waiting for retirement, saving 1% on expenses could leave you with something like 50% more money when you've retired. If you are interested in the lower expense ratios of the Admiral share classes but cannot meet the minimums, note that funds which are available as ETFs can be traded from Vanguard brokerage accounts commission-free and typically charge the same expense ratios as the Admiral shares without any minimums (but you need to trade them as individual shares, and this is less convenient than moving them around in specific dollar amounts)."
The Vanguard Emerging Market Bond Index has a SEC yield of 4.62%, an expense ratio of 0.34%, a purchase fee of 0.75%, and an average duration of 6.7 years.  The Vanguard Emerging Market Bond Index only invests in US Dollar denominated securities, so it is not exposed to currency risk.  The US Intermediate Term Bond Index Fund has a SEC yield of 2.59%, an expense ratio of 0.1% and an average duration of 6.5 years.  So after expenses, the emerging market bond fund gives you 1.04% of extra yield (more in subsequent years as the purchase fee is only paid once).   Here are the results of a study by Vanguard: Based on our findings, we believe that most investors should consider   adding [currency risked] hedged foreign bonds to their existing diversified portfolios. I think a globally diversified bond portfolio results in a portfolio that's more diversified. This is a Vanguard-specific difference in the sense that in the US, Vanguard is a leader in lowering management fees for the mutual funds  that they offer. Of course, several US mutual fund companies have also been lowering the expense ratio of their mutual funds in recent years because more and  more investors have been paying attention to this particular performance parameter, and opting for funds that have low expense ratios. But many US funds have not reduced their expense ratios very much and continue to have expense ratios of 1% or even higher.  For example, American Funds Developing World Growth and Income Fund (DWGAX) charges a 1.39% expense ratio while their 2060 Retirement Fund (AANTX) charges 1.12% (the funds also have a 5.75% sales charge); Putnam Capital Opportunities Fund charges 1.91% for their Class C shares, and so on.   Many funds with high expense ratios (and sometimes sales charges as well) show up as options in far too many 401(k) plans, especially 401(k) plans of small companies, because small companies do not enjoy economies of scale and do not have much negotiating power when dealing with 401(k) custodians and administrators. Where are you planning on buying this ETF?  I'm guessing it's directly through Vanguard?  If so, that's likely your first reason - the majority of brokerage accounts charge a commission per trade for ETFs (and equities) but not for mutual funds.   Another reason is that people who work in the financial industry (brokerages, mutual fund companies, etc) have to request permission for every trade before placing an order.  This applies to equities and ETFs but does not apply to mutual funds.  It's common for a request to be denied (if the brokerage has inside information due to other business lines they'll block trading, if a mutual fund company is trading the same security they'll block trading, etc) without an explanation.  This can happen for months.  For these folks it's typically easier to use mutual funds. So, if someone can open an account with Vanguard and doesn't work in the financial industry then I agree with your premise.  The Vanguard Admiral shares have a much lower expense, typically very close to their ETFs. Source:  worked for a brokerage and mutual fund company Vanguard has a lot of mutual fund offerings.  (I have an account there.)  Within the members' section they give indications of the level of risk/reward for each fund. Here're some findings upon researches: Two main things to watch out for: Estate tax and the 30% tax withholding. These 2 could be get around by investing in Luxembourg or Ireland  domiciled ETF. For instance there's no tax withholding on Ireland domiciled ETF dividend, and the estate tax is not as high. (source: BogleHead forums)  Some Vanguard ETF offered in UK stock market: https://www.vanguard.co.uk/uk/mvc/investments/etf#docstab. Do note that the returns of S&P 500 ETF (VUSA) are adjusted after the 30% tax withholding! Due to VUSA's higher TER (0.09%), VOO should remain a superior choice. The FTSE Emerging Markets and All-World ETFs though, are better than their US-counterparts, for non-US residents. Non-US residents are able to claim back partials of the withhold tax, by filing the US tax form 1040NR. In 2013, non-US resident can claim back at least $3,900. Kindly correct me if anything is inaccurate. Don't have access to a Bloomberg, Eikon ect terminal but I was wondering if those that do know of any functions that show say, the percentage of companies (in different Mcap ranges) held by differing rates institutionally. For example - if I wanted to compare what percentage of small cap companies' shares are 75% or more held by institutions relative to large cap companies what could I search in the terminal? "One other thing to consider, particularly with Vanguard, is the total dollar amount available.  Vanguard has ""Admiralty"" shares of funds which offer lower expense ratios, around 15-20% lower, but require a fairly large investment in each fund (often 10k) to earn the discounted rate.  It is a tradeoff between slightly lower expense ratios and possibly a somewhat less diverse holding if you are relatively early in your savings and only have say 20-30k (which would mean 2 or 3 Admiralty share funds only)." In the case of VFIAX versus VOO, if you're a buy-and-hold investor, you're probably better off with the mutual fund because you can buy fractional shares. However, in general the expense ratio for ETFs will be lower than equivalent mutual funds (even passive index funds). They are the same in this case because the mutual fund is Admiral Class, which has a $10,000 minimum investment that not all people may be able to meet. Additionally, ETFs are useful when you don't have an account with the mutual fund company (i.e. Vanguard), and buying the mutual fund would incur heavy transaction fees. A general mutual fund's exact holdings are not known on a day-to-day basis, and so technical tools must work with inexact data. Furthermore, the mutual fund shares' NAV depends on lots of different shares that it holds, and the  results of the kinds of analyses that one can do for a single stock must be commingled to produce something analogous for the fund's NAV. In other words, there is plenty of shooting in the dark going on. That being said, there are plenty of  people who claim to do such analyses and will gladly sell you their results (actually, Buy, Hold, Sell recommendations) for whole fund families (e.g. Vanguard) in the form of a monthly or weekly Newsletter delivered by US Mail (in the old days) or electronically (nowadays). Some people who subscribe to such newsletters swear by them, while others swear at them and don't renew their subscriptions; YMMV. It's quite alright, it's been over a decade since he passed so I'm not particularly sensitive about it any more.  I'll have a look at investopedia, but what I'm mainly interested in is private equity. I wanted to ask directly about that, but I feel that I need a frame of reference to understand what's going on. As in, I doubt I'd be able to really get private equity without first having an understanding of public trading.  Is this subreddit really that reputable? I've learned to not really trust reddit, for the most part. Is there some kind of curation here? "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www.philly.com/philly/business/vanguard-got-everything-it-ever-wanted-now-what-20170717.html) reduced by 89%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; I think it&amp;#039;s safe to say that 40 years after Vanguard founder John Bogle set out to convince investors that low-cost indexing is better, Vanguard has won the argument.  &gt; As Bloomberg News reported last week, Vanguard is facing &amp;quot;a rise in customer complaints such as accounting errors and longer wait times on phone calls.&amp;quot; No one should take for granted that Vanguard will be able to handle its surging popularity.  &gt; Vanguard is the best thing that ever happened to investors.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6o5kzr/vanguard_got_everything_it_ever_wanted_now_what/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~170145 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **Vanguard**^#1 **investors**^#2 **year**^#3 **During**^#4 **fund**^#5" If you are looking for an index index fund, I know vanguard offers their Star fund which invests in 11 other funds of theirs and is diversified across stocks, bonds, and short term investments. "The portfolio described in that post has a blend of small slices of Vanguard sector funds, such as Vanguard Pacific Stock Index (VPACX).  And the theory is that rebalancing across them will give you a good risk-return tradeoff.  (Caveat: I haven't read the book, only the post you link to.) Similar ETFs are available from Vanguard, iShares, and State Street.  If you want to replicate the GFP exactly, pick from them.  (If you have questions about how to match specific funds in Australia, just ask another question.)  So I think you could match it fairly exactly if you wanted to. However, I think trying to exactly replicate the Gone Fishin Portfolio in Australia would not be a good move for most people, for a few reasons: Brokerage and management fees are generally higher in Australia (smaller market), so dividing your investment across ten different securities, and rebalancing, is going to be somewhat more expensive. If you have a ""middle-class-sized"" portfolio of somewhere in the tens of thousands to low millions of dollars, you're cutting it into fairly small slices to manually allocate 5% to various sectors.  To keep brokerage costs low you probably want to buy each ETF only once every one-two years or so.  You also need to keep track of the tax consequences of each of them. If you are earning and spending Australian dollars, and looking at the portfolio in Australian dollars, a lot of those assets are going to move together as the Australian dollar moves, regardless of changes in the underlying assets.  So there is effectively less diversification than you would have in the US. The post doesn't mention the GFP's approach to tax.  I expect they do consider it, but it's not going to be directly applicable to Australia. If you are more interested in implementing the general approach of GFP rather than the specific details, what I would recommend is: The Vanguard and superannuation diversified funds have a very similar internal split to the GFP with a mix of local, first-world and emerging market shares, bonds, and property trusts.  This is pretty much fire-and-forget: contribute every month and they will take care of rebalancing, spreading across asset classes, and tax calculations.  By my calculations the cost is very similar, the diversification is very similar, and it's much easier. The only thing they don't generally cover is a precious metals allocation, and if you want that, just put 5% of your money into the ASX:GOLD ETF, or something similar." "That share class may not have a ticker symbol though ""Black Rock MSCI ACWI ex-US Index"" does have a ticker for ""Investor A"" shares that is BDOAX.  Some funds will have multiple share classes that is a way to have fees be applied in various ways.  Mutual fund classes would be the SEC document about this if you want a government source within the US around this. Something else to consider is that if you are investing in a ""Fund of funds"" is that there can be two layers of expense ratios to consider.  Vanguard is well-known for keeping its expenses low." I take the route of the tortoise.  I subscribe to the adage that you invest in an excellent index fund like VFINX and forget about day trading and trying to make short term gains. Just like I would do at a casino I do gamble a bit for fun.  Using etrade you can purchase some Vanguard or a billion of other things.  I purchased some Apple, Google, Verizon, and Ford (when it was at 1.3) and all of those have been good investments.  However, I don't invest the majority of my money in to individual stocks.  I just do this with some 'play' money. After maxing out 401k, etc. I put away my 6 months of safety net in a money mark and put the rest in Vanguard.