When it comes to good active management, size is generally the enemy.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some benefits of scale and stability that comes when moving beyond a tiny, starter-level portfolio, but the benefits of having a lot of money to invest can quickly turn into headwinds—particularly for managers buying small-cap stocks.
Vanguard’s success in gathering nearly two trillion new investment dollars into its complex over the past decade means that if you want to add an aggressive stock fund to your portfolio—one that focuses on the more volatile small-cap area of the market—your best option may be to focus on index funds or begin looking outside the Vanguard stable.
I haven’t lost the “Vanguard” script nor the active-management thread—I simply am not going to compromise and buy an average active fund just because it has Vanguard’s name on it.