Talk:Vanguard fund information

Discussion of how this table was generated is at Vanguard Fund Table Development. --LadyGeek 02:59, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Revised comment to break page link (deleted, no longer needed). Spreadsheet for developing this table is under "Data sources". --LadyGeek 19:54, 3 January 2015 (CST)

Reader feedback: Comment on Vanguard ETF trad...
98.248.247.134 posted this comment on 10 January 2015 (view all feedback).

"Comment on Vanguard ETF trading frequency restrictions."

Any thoughts?

Peculiar Investor 14:41, 10 January 2015 (CST)

It's out-of-scope for this page. Follow the right-sidebar link to Frequent trading policy where this is discussed. The wiki does not make editorial opinions. If there are specific questions, please ask in the Bogleheads forum. --LadyGeek 08:42, 11 January 2015 (CST)

Vanguard fund links are no longer reliable
As of June 10, 2023, Vanguard appears to have changed the way its web site operates, so that links to specific funds by fund number no longer work reliably and consistently. For more, see: Template talk:VanguardFundURL. --TedSwippet 07:50, 10 June 2023 (UTC)


 * The discussion is continued here: Template talk:VanguardFundURL --LadyGeek 23:56, 10 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the fix. Template:VanguardFundURL could be augmented to map fund numbers to fund tickers, but it is fiddly, so deleting the template altogether seems reasonable.


 * However, many other wiki articles explicitly, directly and literally use the style of link that was generated by this template -- ...snapshot?FundId= &FundIntExt=INT -- and all of these may now be similarly vulnerable and unreliable. For example, this article alone uses it in 253 links. It should probably switch these to style as .../mutual-funds/profile/ instead.


 * A wider wiki edit seems motivated. Unfortunately, the wiki's standard search facility is not up to the job of identifying everywhere this style of link appears; so far I have been unable to adequately gauge the scale of the problem. --TedSwippet 08:14, 14 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Extension:Replace Text (admin access only) shows that the string  is found on 191 pages and many pages have more than one occurrence.


 * For editors, it should be possible that a list can be found with a MediaWiki API text search (the extension is a text search). API sandbox


 * Vanguard's old site Vanguard - Prospectuses contains a mapping of the fund number to name. This information is not present in the new website. Note that the links are broken on Vanguard's old website as well. Clicking on the link goes to a random fund - each with a fund number of 100(!).


 * There's a possibility that Template:VanguardFundURL could be useful in some new capacity. It's probably best to keep the template until we're sure it's not needed. Worst-case is to do a tedious manual edit. --LadyGeek 18:07, 14 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Sounds like we could be looking at around 500 occurrences of this style of Vanguard URL. That's a lot of manual editing. Instead then, how about this as a possible framework for a fix?
 * Rewrite Template:VanguardFundURL (or a new template; doesn't matter) to accept either a fund number (four digits) or a fund ticker (five alphabetic characters).
 * If numeric, map to a fund ticker (big parser #switch statement?).
 * Then for all cases, generate a new-style Vanguard fund URL based on ticker.
 * Finally, execute a bulk replace of something like https?://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=(\d*)[^ ]* with (guessing on the regex's here).


 * Coding the mapping from fund numbers to tickers is tedious but straightforward. The bulk replacement of hard-coded Vanguard URLs with calls to the template is the fiddliest part, since getting the regex's right will be critical to success (defined as minimal to zero manual fixup required later on!).


 * As a bonus, once we have all these URLs going through a single template, it will be a lot easier to cope with any Vanguard site URL changes of this nature in future. Also, open choice of either fund number or fund ticker for users. Thoughts? --TedSwippet 19:37, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Verification will be tricky, as the URL will redirect on Vanguard's side to some landing page and won't return an error code. The link will always be good.

I managed to coerce Special:LinkSearch to find the broken links. It needs to be entered as a URL, not partial text. has 825 occurrences. Hence, my concern to tread very, very carefully. --LadyGeek 23:31, 14 June 2023 (UTC)


 * We can verify the fund numbers and tickers passed to the template directly. We know what they are, so all we need is a large lookup table, and if we find something in it then we know for certain that we are creating a valid URL. For cases where we don't find an entry, and Vanguard will redirect the generated URL (randomly?), the template can place the page in (say) "Category:Vanguard url error" which we can then clean up manually.


 * Having 825 broken (actually worse, they're misleading) URLs spread across our entire wiki isn't healthy. I think we can do better. I'll prototype a new and improved Template:VanguardFundURL to kick off. Once we have that, with 253 occurrences, Vanguard fund info itself provides a good initial test-case. Do you have a 'play' BH wiki instance on which you can test bulk regex replacement more widely?


 * (As an aside, Vanguard fund info is generated from a spreadsheet. Arguably we shouldn't be editing URLs in this page at all, but rather we should be fixing the underlying spreadsheet. But that still leaves nearly 500 bad Vanguard URLs elsewhere in the wiki.) --TedSwippet 07:47, 15 June 2023 (UTC)


 * ETA: now prototyped here: Special:PermanentLink/81077. I believe that the lookup table is mostly complete. The ETF section should be up-to-date, but the mutual fund section may need some additions or changes, since I created this from the old Vanguard prospectuses page. Additions or corrections welcome. --TedSwippet 12:57, 15 June 2023 (UTC)