The Vanguard Group

The Vanguard Group is an American investment management company based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, that manages approximately $3.0 trillion in assets. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and now the second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the world, with about $451 billion in ETF assets under management, as of March 2015. It offers mutual funds and other financial products and services to retail and institutional investors in the United States and abroad. Founder and former chairman John C. Bogle is credited with the creation of the first index fund available to individual investors, the popularization of index funds generally, and driving costs down across the mutual fund industry.

Vanguard is owned by the funds themselves and, as a result, is owned by the investors in the funds.

The index fund philosophy

For his undergraduate thesis at Princeton, John C. Bogle conducted a study in which he found that around three-quarters of mutual funds did not earn any more money than if they invested in the largest 500 companies simultaneously, using the S&P 500 stock market index as a benchmark. In other words, three out of four of the managers could not pick better specific "winners" than someone passively holding a basket of the 500 largest public U.S companies. The managers could pick specific stocks which would do as well as picking the 500 largest stocks (essentially doing as well as random chance would dictate), but the cost to pay their expenses, as well as the high taxes incurred through active trading, resulted in underperforming the index.