Our Approach

Although we offer many strategies with both internally and externally managed funds, common themes run through the investment advice we provide our clients. Indeed, these tenets have been a part of the company since our inception and are embedded in Vanguard's culture. We've distilled our philosophy into nine statements, which are presented here. For Vanguard, they represent both the past and the future-enduring principles that guide the investment decisions we help our clients make.

Vanguard believes that:

1. Investing is for meeting long-term goals; savings is for meeting short-term goals.
2. Broad diversification, with exposure to all parts of the stock and bond markets, reduces risk.
3. An investor's most important decision is selecting the mix of assets to be held in a portfolio, not selecting the individual investments themselves.
4. Consistently outperforming the financial markets is extremely difficult.
5. Minimizing costs is vital for long-term investment success.
6. Investors should know how each investment fits into their plans and why they own that particular asset.
7. Risk has many dimensions, and investors should weigh "shortfall risk"-the possibility that a portfolio will fail to meet longer-term financial goals-against "market risk", or the chance that returns will fluctuate.
8. Market-timing and performance-chasing are losing strategies.
9. An investor should not expect future long-term returns to be significantly higher or lower than long-term historical returns for various asset classes and subclasses.