Vanguard History

You want Vanguard history! Here's Vanguard history:

The NY Times financial page listings of mutual funds on Friday August 20th 1976 for Thursday's August 19, 1976 trading day showed Vanguard's 8 mututal funds with $2B aum all with substantial 8.5% front-end sales loads. 

Source for all illustrations: New York TimesMachine

"Welltn" is the Wellington Fund, Vanguard's oldest fund, issued July 1, 1929 (source: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vwelx#overview). Wellington was and is a balanced fund (owns stocks AND bonds) that survived the great depression. Wellington was offered, on this date, at $11.05 per share with a Net Asset Value (NAV) or bid at $10.11 per share down $0.09 per share. Note that nearly ALL mutual funds at the time have 8.5% loads. 

The exceptions in this list include the "Unit Svcs", "Vand Gth", Vand Inc", and "Wein Eq" funds all showing N.L. for "No Load", that is no sales charge. No Load funds are NOT sold by brokers - the salesman of the investment industry. No Load funds are sold directly to investors by word of mouth or advertisements. 

On Saturday Aug 21, 1976, as shown in Sunday's listings below, Vanguard posted a placeholder for the "First Index Investment Trust", the world's first S&P 500 index fund. It is displayed with no price as "FtIndx unavail" .

Oddly, the above Sunday listing shows only NAVs and the prior NAV and change. The fund was listed in the papers with no price while Bogle and his associates conducted a road show trying to raise money for the IPO. 

Here we go! Finally, on Tuesday, August 31st and displayed in the NYT's financial pages the next day, the First Index Investment Trust IPO was priced and traded at $15. Oddly, the IPO was issued with a $14.15 NAV equal to a 5.6% load.  According to Bogle (source: "The Professor The Student and the Index Fund") the IPO's brokers' Dean Witter; Bache Halsey Stuart; Paine, Webber, Jackson & Curtis; and Reynolds Securities (all now defunct) were expecting to raise $150MM (or $100MM by other accounts) and raised only $11.3 MM, less than 800,000 shares, for the IPO. The brokers wanted to cancel the offering but Bogle would not have it. 

It took six months for Bogle to realize, without ever saying it as far as I can find, that brokers - the salesmen of the investment industry - would have nothing to do with his new passive index fund. So, on Wednesday, February 9, 1976, the entire portfolio of Vanguard mutual funds dropped their sales charges and went no load.

This is displayed in the NYT first as dots showing no offer price and the next day the NYT got it right showing all Vanguard offerings as no load funds.

The rest of the story you know.