Vanguard's awful "Portfolio Analysis" tool...

[Doc]

It's not so much a bug as it is a lack of desire to enter the thousands of holdings for each mutual fund into a database each quarter and then categorize all those holdings to get the appropriate percentages. It's a fairly labor intensive process when you figure there are thousands of funds out there and no standardized way of reporting holdings.

Though you would think this would be easy enough for Vanguard to do for their own funds. Perhaps they get the data for all funds from a third party, and the third party doesn't do anything special for Vanguard funds.

Morningstar is arguably the best open source for mutual fund data. Why? Morningstar is in the data business. It makes its money by selling data to users. Many funds and non-fund reference sites quote M* data. I'm sure M* collects a fee. How do they get all this data? The fund companies give it to M* free and in the format M* wants for two reason. 1) No fund wants to have "no data available" on the M* site and 2) M* is not in competition with the funds. There is no way a firm like Vanguard can get the needed cooperation from their competitors to establish a data base like M*'s. Even if they did it might be considered collusion and thus be illegal.

Stop wishing guys. It ain't going to happen.

Caveat: This is my opinion. I have no authoritative source to back me up.

[haban01]

I've always felt that M*'s X-Ray is more accurate compared to the Vanguard Tool!! It would be an interesting debate at our Bogleheads reunion!!

[bertilak]

(If it's any consolation I spent about two hours on the phone this spring with someone from Intuit getting them to reproduce a bug in how TurboTax handled the Massachusetts health care mandate in non-resident/part-year returns. The bug was fixed a couple weeks later).

I just went through about two weeks of back and forth with Intuit about a problem downloading transactions from a credit card that recently changed its logon process. (The user had to "register" the computer being used in order to get through the logon and there was a one-time process of setting up the security questions used when doing that registration.)

Intuit's programmers seemed pretty decent about understanding and fixing the problem. It did take two weeks because:

• I had to act as middleman to set up the security questions, get the Quicken logs for each failed attempt and send them back to the Quicken team.
• If the answer to the security question failed (presumable with some retries) the initial set-up was invalidated and that process had to be repeated (by me).
• The credit card company had a bug (acknowledged by them) on their end of the process!

The final solution was that the credit card company fixed their bug, Quicken recognized when a security question was being asked and gave me a pop-up dialog to read and answer the question. Quicken was then able to virtually click the option to remember (register) their computer so security questions would not be asked in the future. The initial one-time set-up process was left as an exercise for the user.

[pascalwager]

I keep a detailed spreadsheet with all kinds of calculated percentages, and the VG tool seems accurate by comparison.

I haven't figured out how it identifies between the US and int'l funds in my outside VA portfolio. These funds don't have symbol entries, just descriptive name entries like large cap value, small value, etc. Yet the grand total and US/int'l ratio are the same as on the spreadsheet.

[YDNAL]

...isn't even accurate on Vanguard's own funds! This thing is an embarrassment to Vanguard.

Here's what Vanguard's "Portfolio & Management" tab shows as the asset allocation for this fund:

You made me look, and Vanguard's "Portfolio & Management" for VSCGX shows:

Asset allocation as of 12/31/2012 (NOT 6/30/2010 as in your quote)
40.50% Stocks
59.50% Bonds
0.00% Short-term reserves
https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/ ... =INT#tab=2

This is shown together with a nice pie chart as posted - one which I don't know how to produce.

[WHL]

I called Vanguard a few weeks ago and asked them to make upgrades to the asset allocation / pie chart feature. I think it's ridiculous that I cannot customize it myself to include different segments.

I'm not smart enough to make an Excel chart for what I want

[leonidas]

For the last couple of weeks I have been using Jemstep to calculate the asset allocation of my portfolio. I signed up last year and never used them since. They are planing to become a pay site but anyone who signs up before a certain date (March?) can use for free. It seems to do good job for my portfolio. If there are assets that Jemstep does not recognize it actually lets you assign a type to them.

[zebrafish]

I posted a thread about a pretty glaring error about the snapshot tool regarding a different issue before:

http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=107890

I think having such a crappy tool undermines their credibility

[YDNAL]

.

I don't know what some people are talking about in this thread. Nisiprius (OP) linked "Portfolio & Management" data from 6/30/2010.

...isn't even accurate on Vanguard's own funds! This thing is an embarrassment to Vanguard.

Here's what Vanguard's "Portfolio & Management" tab shows as the asset allocation for this fund:

.