Admiral Shares vs Investor Shares vs ETF Shares?

[Anonymous]

I'm looking at the types of funds available in the Vanguard website: Admiral Shares, Investor Shares and ETF. From their website, I understand there are some basic differences, like a lower expense ratio/higher min-investment, and higher expense ratio/lower min-investment?

Is there anyone out there with experience, who can tell me some other pros/cons of each, and why they selected one of these over the other? Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I think the only difference with admiralty shares is they require a higher investment and have a lower expense ratio. Make a higher minimum investment and get a lower cost. Sounds like a boglehead plan to me!

[Anonymous]

The PP is right, the admiral shares and the investor shares are exactly the same, but the admiral shares have a lower expense ratio. The ETF shares are similar, but not identical. They are exchange traded, meaning you will pay a commission when buying and selling them and they need to be held in a brokerage account. ETFs might have a lower expense ratio still.

Another difference is redemption, you can redeem an ETF anytime during a day instantly at whatever price it is trading at that day. Mutual funds are redeemed at the end of the day based on the net asset value.

[Anonymous]

if you start with investor shares they will automatically upgrade you to admiral shares once you have enough invested to qualify

[Anonymous]

As mentioned, investor shares and admiral shares are substantially identical, but once you hit the minimum for admiral (usually $10k) you're automatically upgraded to the lower expense ratio.

If you're looking at Vanguard, for your funds, you will find very few differences. ETFs have the same expense ratio as admiral shares, and Vanguard doesn't charge any fees or commissions to buy/sell its own ETFs.

Personally, I hold mutual fund shares rather than ETFs. The biggest difference to me is that you can't buy/sell fractional shares of an ETF. So if an ETF is trading at $20, and I want to invest $50, I have to buy two shares, and hold the remainder in cash. While you can acquire fractional shares through Vanguard from re-investing dividends, you generally can't sell fractional shares. So if you need $35, you'll have to sell two shares, and keep the leftover in cash. Mutual funds will let you trade down to the .001 of a share, so you can always buy/sell the exact dollar amount you want.

The Bogleheads have a good page on the differences: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/ETFs_vs_mutual_funds

[Anonymous]

The previous comments make good points. As another reference, Vanguard just put up an article on ETFs saying ETFs and Admiral Shares are priced the same.

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/insights/article/10-questions-etfs-052017

I still have my money in Admiral Shares. The intraday trading feature of ETFs is not important to me. The long term investor should not be trying to pick the best time of day to make a trade.