Board Ownership
Updated on September 23, 2025
Mutual fund directors are either not being paid nearly enough for what they should be doing—or far too much for what they actually do.
– Jack Bogle, SmartMoney, July 2012
Should Vanguard’s trustees—tasked with watching over trillions of other people’s dollars—also invest their own hard-earned money alongside the shareholders they represent?
It's a straightforward question. And one you’d think a self-described owner-focused investment firm would lean into.
Yet Vanguard makes it surprisingly difficult to know whether its trustees are really “eating their own cooking.”
The problem isn’t that the data doesn’t exist—it’s that it’s buried. The fund-by-fund disclosures appear in each Statement of Additional Information (SAI), a companion document to the prospectus. That’s dozens of filings, scattered across the year.
Even then, the reporting is limited. Trustees’ investments must only be disclosed in one of five ranges:
- $0
- $1–$10,000
- $10,001–$50,000
- $50,001–$100,000
- over $100,000
That’s it. Nothing comprehensive. Nothing easy to track. For individual investors—the very "owners" Vanguard claims to serve—the information is practically inaccessible.
But since Vanguard won’t make this simple, I’ve done the legwork for you.
Below, Premium Members can see how much Vanguard’s trustees are investing alongside us.
The first table gives a high-level view: Trustee tenure and compensation, the number of Vanguard funds they own, and at what levels.