The Vanguard Group is an American investment management company based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, that manages approximately $3.6 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 after BlackRock, 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.
