In a move that will benefit all investors, the world’s leading low-cost fund provider Vanguard continues pushing fees down as it grows. The fee wars across the fund industry will only heat up. Bloomberg reported:
Vanguard Group has a message for competitors trying to undercut its prices: Game on.
In recent years, rival asset managers such as Fidelity Investments and BlackRock Inc. have cut their fund fees to match or beat Vanguard, the low-cost investing pioneer with $4.4 trillion in assets. Tim Buckley, Vanguard’s new president and incoming chief executive officer, said the company will keep lowering fund expenses as it grows.
Tim Buckley, an incoming Vanguard CEO, stated on a company webcast: “As we continue to get scale, as we continue to grow and we get more efficient, we pass a large part of that back to our clients in the form of lower expenses. That’s not going to stop. If other people want to offer index funds, great. But you better be ready to keep lowering price, and we’re going to do it across every product.”
Buckley will suceed Bill McNabb as chief executive of Vanguard at the end of the year. He will continue the tradition of low-fee, passive management strategies started by Jack Bogle in 1975 when Vanguard was founded.
Last year alone 226 Vanguard funds and ETFs reported expense ratio declines, saving customers an estimated $337 million cumulatively, the company said.