Beware VG DOES NOT update all your account values [UPDATE]

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livesoft
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Beware VG DOES NOT update all your account values [UPDATE]

Post by livesoft »

UPDATE NOV 27, 2014: Appearances were deceiving. Still broken.
UPDATE NOV 1, 2014: Vanguard has appeared to have fixed this problem. See: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtop ... 5#p2243825

Has anybody else noticed that your Vanguard account uses values for ETFs that are wrong (about two days old) if you have them among your "Outside investments --- Accounts that you have added"? I have communicated with Vanguard about this, but the CSR cannot understand what I am asking about because they probably don't use the Vanguard web site themselves.

So to help explain it, I am going to post it here, ask for feedback from my friends here, then if I have explained it well enough here and find other folks are affected, I intend to send a link to this thread to Vanguard. So here goes …

If one logs in to their Vanguard online acccount, they end up on the My Accounts Overview page as shown next with a [ficticious sample] Outside investments account of 1000 shares of VTI with an incorrect value of $96,540.00 as of 04/17/2014 (the date shown by Vanguard, but the value was correct at 6 am on 04/17/2014, but not at 6 pm on 04/17/2014):

Image

then one can click on My Accounts then Balances and Holdings to get something like this where I show the account with 1000 shares of VTI (Vanguard Total US Stock Market Index fund) which last closed at $96.73 a share, so Vanguard does show a correct total value of $96,730.00 on this web page:
Image

These 1000 shares of VTI are not held at Vanguard, but in an Outside account, so it looks like this with the correct value of $96,730.00:
Image




It is not just the Overview page, but the Portfolio Watch page that has the incorrect values problem.
Now it's the weekend and one would like to look at Portfolio Watch as shown next, but this view has Wednesday's closing price of VTI which was $96.54. That is, the total is now $96,540.00 as shown in the screen capture below with the amount highlighted by a red oval.



Image

The above example shows only a small difference because the change from Wednesday to Thursday was small. However, on days when the prices changed by 1.5% or more, then one cannot trust the asset allocation reported by the Portfolio Watch tool. Generally, it is of little consequence, but if one is trying to use the Portfolio Watch or Portfolio Tester tool from Vanguard to adjust one's asset allocation, then one has to be aware of this on days of large market movements.

Furthermore, the Portfolio Watch information will be updated sometime early Monday morning, but not during the weekend or holidays. I think it should be updated within a few hours of the market close. The correct information is updated and available for display a few hours before the market opens. Then when prices change at the market open, it is no longer correct.

Clearly Vanguard has access to the correct closing price of VTI and other ETFs. Why Vanguard does not use the correct closing prices on the Overview page and the Portfolio Watch pages while it uses the correct closing prices on the Balances & Holdings page is something that I just cannot understand.

(Needless to say: All accounts and account values appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to any accounts of any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)
Last edited by livesoft on Thu Nov 27, 2014 8:21 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by cherijoh »

Livesoft,

I don't have the problem you are describing since I only have ETFs in my Vanguard account and mutual funds in my outside account. I think I understand what you're trying to say, but I do think it could be explained more clearly. See if this captures what you meant:

When ETFs are included in my outside investments on the balance page, their values are out of sync between the overview on the investment home page and when I click into the balance and holdings page and view my outside investments. The overview always lags by one day in the share price used (screen shot A below), while the balance and holdings shows use the correct value (screenshot B below). The incorrect value is also being used to calculate the pie chart in my portfolio watch (screen shot C below).

Then insert your screen shots in order.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

Thanks, that's helpful.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by cherijoh »

livesoft wrote:Thanks, that's helpful.
You are welcome. When do you typically check your account? In the evening after the market closes or the next morning? I would be curious to see if the lag is a full day or if it only lags by X hours and they are in sync for part of the day.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by richard »

I hold some TIPS in my Vanguard brokerage account. Values get updated some number of hours after 6:00pm (certainly by the next morning), while my Vanguard mutual fund values get updated within minutes.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

cherijoh wrote:
livesoft wrote:Thanks, that's helpful.
You are welcome. When do you typically check your account? In the evening after the market closes or the next morning? I would be curious to see if the lag is a full day or if it only lags by X hours and they are in sync for part of the day.
I check on the weekend. The values are wrong all weekend for Vanguard ETFs held under Outside investments. I finally got annoyed enough with the discrepancy between the Overview page and the Balance&Holdings page that I spent some time investigating what is happening and thus checked values often for several days to see when the update occurs. That's why I know things are correct in the early morning on days that the market will be open and incorrect at all other times.

Funny thing is that mutual funds (at least the non-Vanguard ones that I have in my 401(k)) that I entered on the Outside investments page are updated in a timely fashion.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Code Commit »

livesoft wrote:I check on the weekend. The values are wrong all weekend for Vanguard ETFs held under Outside investments.
This has been my experience, so I simply stopped watching the "My accounts" page. The "Balances & Holdings" page is usually more up to date. Or Fidelity Full View for a more timely picture of the entire portfolio.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

Code Commit wrote:…. Or Fidelity Full View for a more timely picture of the entire portfolio.
I use Fidelity as well and it suffers from a similar problem in that up-to-date account values on one page are not reflected in the Analysis (Guided Portfolio Summary) page which uses stale values.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by cfs »

Solution.

Plug the number of shares into the Morningstar portfolio tracker, and problem solved.

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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Spades »

Livesoft,

That's a great find. While I'm with Fidelity, I sure hope Vanguard fixes this.

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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by bertilak »

How about this:
Vanguard's web site shows the value of outside investments on three pages (at lest). The values given do not match.

This makes for confusion and uncertainty. It could lead to mistakes when one is trying to make decisions, for example deciding if and by how much to rebalance.
(Now go on to give details and examples.)

I think that first two sentences are important. The problem is identified immediately, without need for further explanation; the reader does not have to follow a discussion to understand what the problem is. The second paragraph states why the mismatch is a problem, regardless of any reasons why things are the way they are -- and you know that will be their first response.

Further discussion can be used to give details and examples. Here is where you could bring up that outside investments are involved .
Last edited by bertilak on Sat Apr 19, 2014 9:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by mhc »

I have VSS in my HSA at Fidelity. I just summed up all my outside holdings from the Accounts & Holdings tab and it matched the number on the Overview tab.

I have seen that the totals on the Overview tab did not match the Accounts & Holdings tab. I have learned that if the exact number matters, I look at the Accounts & Holdings tab. Next time I see a difference, I'll see if it is related to VSS.

I agree that Vanguard should be able to get it correct on all the tabs, but it is not a huge deal for me. I don't use Portfolio Watch because it does not understand the CIT's in my 401k.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by furwut »

My 401k is with Vanguard and I've become accustomed to the fact that the plan's balances are not updated until the next day. The share prices are but the balances are not.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by KyleAAA »

Probably caching the results for performance reasons. You wouldn't want to live-check the price when everybody logs in because the load would bring the servers down, so you've got to do some sort of batching. It doesn't help that their systems are likely a patchwork of out-dated machines that aren't quite really integrated properly. So it's not an issue of not having the correct prices, it's getting those correct prices from one end of the system to another. It's not like you can just say "go get me this price right now" in a system this large and complex. There's likely no way to actually do that. I could see this being insanely expensive to fix and I doubt it's high on their TODO list, nor should it be.

I also wouldn't expect a CSR to be at all familiar with what's going on behind the scenes.
Last edited by KyleAAA on Sat Apr 19, 2014 9:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

KyleAAA wrote:Probably caching the results for performance reasons.
That's an idea, but since the prices are correct on one page and not others, that makes me think caching is not the problem. Also since non-Vanguard mutual fund pricing is the same (AND correct) on all the pages, that makes me think caching is not the problem.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by KyleAAA »

livesoft wrote:
KyleAAA wrote:Probably caching the results for performance reasons.
That's an idea, but since the prices are correct on one page and not others, that makes me think caching is not the problem.
No, it's still caching. They are almost certainly running on completely separate systems. I deal with this stuff at work all the time. People usually make the mistake of thinking "oh, page1 on vanguard.com and page2 on vanguard.com are running on the same server and have access to the same data." Often not true. It was probably built after the fact, probably using a completely different technology, and they are just using some router magic to route between the two seamlessly. Where I work, you could be hitting 5 completely different applications written in dramatically different languages just viewing a single page on the site. And none of those systems share data with each other except via very specific pre-defined interfaces.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by LadyGeek »

This thread is now in the Investing - Theory, News & General forum (general investing question).

livesoft - If those are your real numbers, I strongly recommend obscuring the values here (public information) and sending the actual ones to Vanguard. Aggregation of information (stuff posted here combined with other stuff found on the internet) may lead to personal identification.

Update: sscritic corrected my missed observation. The numbers are not real.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by sscritic »

I am retired. I never notice the holidays (when the market is closed). Ignore what used to be here if you happened to read it.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by sscritic »

LadyGeek wrote: livesoft - If those are your real numbers,
[ficticious sample]
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Doc »

richard wrote:I hold some TIPS in my Vanguard brokerage account. Values get updated some number of hours after 6:00pm (certainly by the next morning), while my Vanguard mutual fund values get updated within minutes.
TIPS purchased at auction on Thursday April 19 are showing zero cost even though the transaction is posted. But there is a warning message.
The total excludes any balance for unavailable holding information.
And no I know the markets were closed Friday. Schwab was able to post the correct holding information so the problem is with Vg.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by LadyGeek »

sscritic wrote:
LadyGeek wrote: livesoft - If those are your real numbers,
[ficticious sample]
I missed the obvious statement and have corrected my post. :oops:
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by RNJ »

Our 401k is with Fidelity and we have it listed in the "Outside Accounts" section of our holdings in the Vanguard account view. And yes, the Vanguard page is typically a day behind in updating the 401k information even though it is mostly invested in a Vanguard fund (intermediate treasury VFIUX). It's an annoyance more than a problem, though I would feel otherwise if the holding were more volatile (like a SCV ETF).
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by iceport »

I have Vanguard ETFs in Vanguard accounts, and only mutual funds plus a stable value fund in an "Outside investment" account. The values of the Vanguard ETFs (in Vanguard accounts) reported on the overview/home page always seem to lag one day behind the values in the "balances and holdings" page. It's corrected overnight.

My outside investment accounts are another matter. I have that aggregating service set to update manually, so the values are never correct there until I manually update/synchronize the account at Vanguard. Unfortunately, the update/synchronization doesn't take effect in the "balances and holdings" page or in the portfolio watch area until I log out, then log back in. Then all is well. I typically only do this on weekends, so the disconnect between the home page and other pages that I see during the week is not an issue.

The balances in the outside investment account (ING is the TPA for a defined contribution plan) are also updated overnight -- so they are always a day behind also.

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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by steve roy »

Livesoft,

Good catch. I, too, have noticed the discrepancy. So I always go (went) to balances and accounts for the up-to-date version.

Unlike you, I was too lazy to figure out WHY there was a discrepancy. I kind of noted it was due to the ETFs but never analyzed it closely. So, thanks for the analysis.
Last edited by steve roy on Sat Apr 19, 2014 8:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by SpringMan »

cfs wrote:Solution.

Plug the number of shares into the Morningstar portfolio tracker, and problem solved.

Do great things and thanks for reading this note.
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Good advice. This works well and you don't need a premium Morningstar membership to set up a portfolio but do need to create a free login account and password. When reinvesting dividends and capital gains, it is necessary to manually update your number of shares in the affected funds. If you share your portfolio, it will show up as a suitcase next to any discussion group posts you do. Percentages only are shown, no actual dollars. This also allows for a limited portfolio xray.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by tetractys »

This is nothing new, the outside investment tool Vanguard uses has always been somewhat after the fact. And further, there are some investments, such as Ibonds, that have to be updated manually, My answer: It's not worth the problems; and second, why would a long term investor even need this anyway? And what a headache to use any of these tools! The M* tool is a big headache as well--certainly there are easier ways to proceed. Even spending hours and days setting up a home spreadsheet, or sheets, is much more efficient in the long run.

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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by dl7848 »

tetractys wrote: And what a headache to use any of these tools! The M* tool is a big headache as well--certainly there are easier ways to proceed.
I've heard many complaints about M*'s portfolio tracker. I'd recommend that anyone considering using it read the current and historical remarks on the M* board. I do believe the inaccuracies involve incorrect price information rather than just incorrect info when the user doesn't manually update the share count when reinvesting divies and cap gains (like Springman mentioned). Though I can't be 100% sure on that.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

tetractys wrote:This is nothing new, ...
Yes, it's nothing new, but if no one tells Vanguard, they won't even try to fix it.

Vanguard has fixed things before on their web site that I mentioned to them, so I have my hopes up on this one, too.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by derosa »

I guess as a long term and long time investor I am not getting what all this is about.

Why are you checking your account every hour or so - at least that is what it seems to me.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

I was checking my account every hour or so as a public service to the forum in order to figure out what was going on with the display of numbers at Vanguard. That way, when somebody asks "What's going on with the numbers in my account on Vanguard's web site?" I will be able to answer with a link to this thread.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by lululu »

If I want to know what one of my accounts is doing, I look at the website for that institution. Why would anyone Not expect that there would be lags and inconsistencies if another place is dragging that data off? Why would a long term investor worry about a day's lag anyway?
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Aptenodytes »

Another reason to roll your own portfolio tracker.

(Now if I could just find a way to get automated access to TIAA-CREF institutional fund prices, but I"m guessing Vanguard can't get them either...)
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Aptenodytes »

lululu wrote:If I want to know what one of my accounts is doing, I look at the website for that institution.
err, that's what he's trying to do.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by sscritic »

Aptenodytes wrote:
lululu wrote:If I want to know what one of my accounts is doing, I look at the website for that institution.
err, that's what he's trying to do.
The key as I understand it is that he has Vanguard ETFs, but not at Vanguard. So where is the website for that institution? If the Vanguard ETFs are at Wells Fargo, is Wells Fargo the institution for the Vanguard ETFs or is Vanguard the institution for the Vanguard ETFs? Since the account is at WF, then to see the account you should go to WF. If you want to see the value of a Vanguard ETF held at WF, then Vanguard should be able to give you the correct NAV, but not necessarily the number of shares held at WF.

Going to Vanguard to see what is in your account at WF doesn't make a lot of sense to me, which is why I don't use "Outside Investments." If I want to know what is in my TIAA Traditional Account, I go to TIAA. I very much doubt that Vanguard's Outside Investments can track TIAA Traditional. Now knowing that livesoft loves to experiment and suspecting from other threads that he has TIAA Traditional, I ask, can you track Traditional in Outside Investments?
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

sscritic wrote:Now knowing that livesoft loves to experiment and suspecting from other threads that he has TIAA Traditional, I ask, can you track Traditional in Outside Investments?
Yes, one can track TIAA Traditional as fixed income at Vanguard, but only manually. And one can track TIAA Real Estate Account as "Other" manually at Vanguard as well. They show up nicely in the Vanguard Portfolio Watch tool as expected.

Vanguard shows me quite nicely what is in our other accounts including those at WF because I have told Vanguard the exact number of shares in our other accounts. I have done this manually.

It is just that Vanguard knows the previous closing price of a share of VTI on some of the pages Vanguard displays, but doesn't know the previous closing price of a share of VTI on closely related pages that it displays. For a financial institution that purportedly manages trillions of dollars of assets, it seems to be pretty lame that it cannot use the correct price for its own ETF on its own web pages under its own control.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Aptenodytes »

sscritic wrote:
Aptenodytes wrote:
lululu wrote:If I want to know what one of my accounts is doing, I look at the website for that institution.
err, that's what he's trying to do.
The key as I understand it is that he has Vanguard ETFs, but not at Vanguard. So where is the website for that institution? If the Vanguard ETFs are at Wells Fargo, is Wells Fargo the institution for the Vanguard ETFs or is Vanguard the institution for the Vanguard ETFs? Since the account is at WF, then to see the account you should go to WF. If you want to see the value of a Vanguard ETF held at WF, then Vanguard should be able to give you the correct NAV, but not necessarily the number of shares held at WF.

Going to Vanguard to see what is in your account at WF doesn't make a lot of sense to me, which is why I don't use "Outside Investments." If I want to know what is in my TIAA Traditional Account, I go to TIAA. I very much doubt that Vanguard's Outside Investments can track TIAA Traditional. Now knowing that livesoft loves to experiment and suspecting from other threads that he has TIAA Traditional, I ask, can you track Traditional in Outside Investments?
I see -- it is a bit of a mobius strip, isn't it. I retract my correction; sorry lululu. The original point remains valid that Vanguard has no excuse not to know the value of its own ETFs.

I've always updated my TIAA values more or less manually every few months or so. I briefly got automated scraping of fund values but that broke after a while and I didn't bother trying to fix it. The return on the Traditional changes so slowly that you could probably plug in an estimated return for an entire year and not be too far off; you could manually correct it once a year and minimize the work.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by sscritic »

livesoft wrote: Yes, one can track TIAA Traditional as fixed income at Vanguard, but only manually. And one can track TIAA Real Estate Account as "Other" manually at Vanguard as well. They show up nicely in the Vanguard Portfolio Watch tool as expected.
OK, so depending on how bored I am this afternoon, I might enter all my T/C stuff just to see how pretty Portfolio Watch can be. Right now, it has a lot of red on one page, orange on another, and purple on a third. I think there are more colors on other pages, but I haven't gotten there yet.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

I thnk it would be more fun to go to lunch instead.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by sscritic »

livesoft wrote:I thnk it would be more fun to go to lunch instead.
My treat this time.
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Two day old posted values?

Post by Taylor Larimore »

Has anybody else noticed that your Vanguard account uses values for ETFs that are wrong (about two days old).
We must be in different worlds. I couldn't care less about (unofficial) values that might be "two days old." What difference does it make to stay-the-course investors?

Best wishes.
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Re: Two day old posted values?

Post by livesoft »

Taylor Larimore wrote:
Has anybody else noticed that your Vanguard account uses values for ETFs that are wrong (about two days old).
We must be in different worlds. I couldn't care less about (unofficial) values that might be "two days old." What difference does it make to stay-the-course investors?
I think it makes a difference to stay-the-course investors who rebalance when their rebalancing bands are triggered. If one is using a tool such as Portfolio Watch to see if a rebalancing band is triggered, then they will get erroneous information.

One may ask, "Would not the rebalancing band be triggered anyways, but just a day or two later?" And I think the answer is "Maybe, but not necessarily." And the reason is that if one holds a mix of mutual funds and ETFs, then the mutual funds may drop and but the ETFs may have gained (the day before), so Portfolio Watch does not give one the proper calculation. Then perhaps the next day, the mutual funds gain a lot, but then the ETFs show a big drop. In effect, the movements of one's mutual funds and ETFs could cancel each other out very near a trigger point.

Suppose I just got a bonus that I wanted to invest today based on my asset allocation into the asset class that was lagging? If the day was volatile with non-small price movements, then Portfolio Watch tool would be giving me mis-information, so that it would be possible that I would not invest in the asset class that was lagging.

And I can anticipate a response to the above: But so what? Would the trigger point not be reached eventually or if it is really that close that a one-day mis-pricing matters for the trigger, why would a long-term investor care? Or perhaps, one could invoke that rebalancing doesn't matter that much in the long run. Or perhaps, don't invest a bonus until the market is not volatile for a few days in a row.

Let me redirect the question another way: "Would you be satisified if Vanguard only updated your account values (a) once a week? (b) once a month? ( c) once a quarter? (d) once a year?" No doubt, some of us would be satisfied with any of these choices. And some of us would not be satisfied.
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dbr
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by dbr »

It looks like depending on Vanguard for this information is not working very well. But the question is why would one expect that it would. Keeping track of all one's assets strikes me as an "optional" service that isn't necessary. It could be other mutual fund companies provide a better service, in which case one could go elsewhere. It might be even easier, or at least more reliable, to track everything oneself in a spreadsheet or in some other tool commercially available.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by nisiprius »

What, it's not accurate second by second? How am I going to stay within my 0.01% rebalancing bands? <--Irony, joke, etc.

I do criticize Vanguard and other services for not even trying to set expectations as to accuracy, timeliness, etc. (For example, one of my little peeves is that whenever I plot the dividend historical data from Yahoo! Finance, it always is full of little gaps and occasional weird spikes, and not the slightest indication anywhere of what their data source is and whether there is any other explanation for the weird stuff other than faulty data).

But then I am skeptical about the accuracy of financial data in general, and I've noticed that many people from a science and engineering background seem to be. It is not confidence-inspiring to see different numbers in the 2005 and 2010 editions of the SBBI Classic Yearbook for "the total return of the S&P 500 for 1985." You'd think that would be a simple historical fact that shouldn't be changing! The difference was 32.16% in the 2005 edition versus 31.73% in the 2010 edition, which is not earthshaking--but if those were the differences in the annual returns of two mutual funds, boosters would point to it as an indication of superiority.
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Five Scoop
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Five Scoop »

It does not fix the problem about displaying accurate to-the-second prices, but why not just transfer your Vanguard ETFs from Wells Fargo over to Vanguard?
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

Five Scoop wrote:It does not fix the problem about displaying accurate to-the-second prices, but why not just transfer your Vanguard ETFs from Wells Fargo over to Vanguard?
I am not interested in accurate-to the-second prices. I would like them to accurate-to-the-12-hours. Today is Sunday, April 20th and the prices for some mainstream ETFs on the Vanguard web site are still from April 16th. I will point out again that April 17th was a full normal market open day. Vanguard has prices for mutual funds from April 17th. There is no reason that Vanguard should not have prices for ETFs from April 17th.

Essentially, if I investigated my portfolio with the Vanguard Portfolio Watch tool on one weekend per month or per 6 months or per 12 months, it would always have the wrong values. That is, it would be incorrect EVERY weekend.

Furthermore, we had ETFs at Vanguard Brokerage Services at one time. Vanguard BS left out the Services part of its name, so I had to move my assets elsewhere.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by Wildebeest »

KyleAAA wrote:
livesoft wrote:
KyleAAA wrote:Probably caching the results for performance reasons.
That's an idea, but since the prices are correct on one page and not others, that makes me think caching is not the problem.
No, it's still caching. They are almost certainly running on completely separate systems. I deal with this stuff at work all the time. People usually make the mistake of thinking "oh, page1 on vanguard.com and page2 on vanguard.com are running on the same server and have access to the same data." Often not true. It was probably built after the fact, probably using a completely different technology, and they are just using some router magic to route between the two seamlessly. Where I work, you could be hitting 5 completely different applications written in dramatically different languages just viewing a single page on the site. And none of those systems share data with each other except via very specific pre-defined interfaces.
Thanks KyleAAA. This makes sense to me.

Thanks Livesoft for pursuing this.

I have noted this as well and I find is very disturbing that Vanguard is unable to post the correct data.
It makes me wonder what else is not done right/ incorrectly.

Furthermore it is disappointing that the Vanguard rep is no help.

If KyleAAA is correct all and it is too expensive to fix, I would suggest that "Vanguard" would make a note, * to explain why the correct data is not entered yet and when it can be expected.

I will call my rep in the AM.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by lululu »

livesoft wrote: It is just that Vanguard knows the previous closing price of a share of VTI on some of the pages Vanguard displays, but doesn't know the previous closing price of a share of VTI on closely related pages that it displays. For a financial institution that purportedly manages trillions of dollars of assets, it seems to be pretty lame that it cannot use the correct price for its own ETF on its own web pages under its own control.
Well to do that, the programmer says, Vanguard would have to paw through the list of items in the outside accounts, note which ones are theirs, and handle those differently from the other items. Instead it presumably does the much simpler thing of believing the outside site for everything that site holds for that customer.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

I think I am qualified to comment about programming and programmers based on my 35 years experience in the field which includes writing software, leading software groups, hiring programmers, helping to design web sites, writing content for web sites, helping to build web sites, etc.

I think the folks that don't understand what is going on here either don't use Vanguard or perhaps do not use their "Outside investments" feature. Vanguard already paws through the list of items in "Outside investments". Also none of these "Outside investmets" are linked in any way to an external web site, so that Vanguard does not need to go to an external web site to get any information about them whatsoever.

OTOH, if Vanguard can produce the correct prices for mutual funds whether Vanguard funds or non-Vanguard funds, then Vanguard should be able to produce the correct prices for ETFs whether Vanguard ETFs or non-Vanguard ETFs and that should happen whether Vanguard goes external or stays internal. I simply suspect that a procedure call to get prices points to the correct place in one part of the Vanguard web site and either is missing from the other parts of the Vanguard web site or points to a stale place to get prices. That is, this problem is trivial to repair once it is brought to their attention.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by lululu »

Another reason for Vanguard not doing this is suppose the outside company messes up your account, and you don't know it because Vanguard has substituted the correct numbers. Nasty legal mess ensues, perhaps making Vanguard liable.
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Re: Beware Vanguard DOES NOT update all your account values

Post by livesoft »

Once again, there is no connection to any outside accounts … imagined or otherwise. And that works both ways: Vanguard doesn't connect to outside accounts and my outside accounts don't connect to Vanguard.

I am only talking about transferring a price quote from "Balances and Holdings" to "Overview".
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