Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm your host, I Van A Hampton. Will Vanguard's next 50 years live up to his

first half century? The popular investment firm counts millions of everyday investors among his clients.

Vanguard's CEO, Selim Romge, joined the firm from its rival, BlackRock.

Ramji is influencing Vanguard's direction while keeping the overall mission intact.

But the company continues to evolve under the new leadership with a greater

emphasis on advice and the launch of new funds. This episode is the first of a two-part series

examining what's going on with Vanguard in 2026. Joining me is Vanguard analyst Dan Sateroff.

He's also the associate director of U.S. Passer Strategy's Research for Morningstar.

It's good to see you, Dan. It's good to see you, too, Ivana. Well, it's almost

Salim Romji's second anniversary as the CEO of Vanguard. How has he influenced the firm since

tanking the helm? You know, so far, so good. I'd say he's been pretty busy compared to past CEOs. We're seeing a lot of stuff come out. As evident, you gave me something like 20 questions here to answer something. So we got a lot to go through. But, you know, there's a lot going on. There's a lot of questions. So, but I would say for the most part, you know, it's been pretty good. A lot of the stuff we've seen has been very Vanguard-like. Some of it expected, some of it unexpected, like the fee cuts. Did a lot of new ETFs last year. They did 15 ETFs. Most of those were fixed income, which I know we're going to talk about. But that's the most on year they've had. You have to go back to 2010, I think,

was when they had more ETF launches. So doing a lot of cool stuff there. And then the feet cuts,

like, nice surprise, you know, and not an insignificant amount of money that they're giving up

over the coming year. So I know you wanted to talk about that a little bit. So yeah, it's probably

the one area is just that we're kind of like still questioning is private assets right now, but they just haven't come out with a lot of stuff yet. So we're kind of in wait and see mode there. What grade would you give them? You know, we do grade them. We got a scale between one to five, low to high. And right now, Vanguard is a five or a high right now.

There's not too many asset management firms that get that rating. So that rating is

sticking until we see substantial enough evidence to change our minds on that.

Now, one of the big changes underway is the company splitting into two investment advisors,

Vanguard Capital Management, Vanguard

portfolio management. What are the responsibilities of each unit and who's leading them?

Yeah, good question. So I did put some information on this last year when they announced

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