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Vanguard Wins Over E*Trade With ETFs Despite 'No Payment' Policy

FYI: Vanguard Group won a victory of sorts when E*Trade Financial Corp. added 32 of its exchange-traded funds to its commission-free platform. The arrangement allows prospective Vanguard buyers to avoid the $6.95 fee that E*Trade charges to trade funds that don’t make the cut, the online brokerage said in a statement this week.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/vanguard-wins-over-e-trade-with-etfs-despite--no-payment--policy-39370.html?print

Comments

  • IMHO, too little too late. I suppose technically not too little, as E*Trade added 32 Vanguard ETFs (as well as 3 iShares and several from lesser known families), after having dropped a somewhat different 32 Vanguard ETFs last year.

    New additions: https://about.etrade.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1070496
    2017 dropped ETFs: https://www.tdameritrade.com/retail-en_us/resources/pdf/TDA1000834.pdf

    Missing are ETFs like VEU and VYM that were dropped last year. In their place seem to be several new Vanguard ETFs such as Vanguard's "factor" ETFs.

    FYI, the commission-free ETFs that E*Trade added last year at the same time it was dropping Vanguard and iShares:
    https://www.tdameritrade.com/retail-en_us/resources/pdf/TDA1000835.pdf

    And the list of relatively obscure ETFs that it added even earlier that year:
    https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170224005360/en/E*TRADE-Expands-Lineup-Funds-47-Commission-Free-ETFs

    E*Trade may not be quite ready for prime time, as its current list of ETFs offered commission free doesn't show the funds just added. (This appears to be a live page, so if you follow the link in a few days, it will probably have been updated by then.)
    https://research.tdameritrade.com/grid/public/etfs/commissionfree/commissionfree.asp

  • @msf, I think you may be confusing E*TRADE with TD Ameritrade. TD Ameritrade dumped Vanguard etfs from its commission-free list last year and as far as I've ever been aware E*TRADE has never offered Vanguard etfs commission-free, until the change Ted linked. Many of E*TRADE's commission-free etfs are not what I'd consider totally mainstream so this seems like a big step forward and it seems to me like an effort to take market share from TD Ameritrade even though the timing is kind of late for that.
  • My apologies. You're absolutely right - I don't know what I was thinking. Thanks for catching that.

    At least my first part, about E*Trade also adding a few iShares and others was correct. After that, I went off the rails.

    I agree that many of the ETFs that are found on commission-free lists (TDA but others as well), like many mutual funds found on NTF lists, seem to be rather offbeat (or simply expensive). Their inclusion make the lists larger, but not necessarily more useful.
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