Vanguard Personal Investor Review: Free to Buy Vanguard ETFs, A$9 to Sell

The short version

• A$0 brokerage to buy Vanguard ETFs, and no account fee on Vanguard products. Nothing else in the nine-platform set we track gets close to free.
• A$9.00 flat to sell a Vanguard ETF. Free in, nine dollars out.
• Non-Vanguard ASX shares cost A$9.00 flat each way, plus an account fee of 0.10% a year on the value held in direct shares.
• There is no US market. Not expensive, not restricted: it does not exist on this platform.
• A$200 minimum investment, and Auto Invest runs from A$200 a cycle but does not work on direct ASX shares.
• No HIN in your name. Your holdings sit with a custodian, not registered to you at the ASX.

What it costs

Two scenarios, both A$1,000 a month for ten years, 120 purchases, buy and hold.

For context, ten years of A$1,000 a month into ASX shares elsewhere in the set: Superhero A$240, Stake A$360, moomoo A$360, CommSec A$600, Pearler A$780, Interactive Brokers A$792, Selfwealth A$1,140, CMC Invest A$1,320. Read those against the two rows above and the shape of the platform appears. A$0 is the cheapest outcome in the set. A$1,957 is the second dearest, and eight times what Superhero charges over the same decade.

Order size, the non-Vanguard case

A$9.00 whatever the size, and nothing in the US column because there is nothing to put there. Vanguard managed funds carry no brokerage either way, and there is no opening, closing, deposit or withdrawal fee.

Ten years of direct ASX shares

The table below prices the non-Vanguard scenario, which is the one where this platform behaves like an expensive broker. Buying Vanguard ETFs instead takes the same decade to A$0, because the brokerage is waived and the account fee does not apply to Vanguard products. That gap, between the same amount of money invested the same way, is the whole review.

The question that decides it

Every other platform in this series does the same job at a different price. This one does a different job. It is a platform built around one fund manager's products, free for those products, and priced like an expensive broker for everything else. That is not a flaw in the design, it is the design.

So the decision reduces to one question: are you buying Vanguard products, or anything else? If the answer is Vanguard ETFs, bought monthly and held, you pay nothing, and no platform in our set beats free. If it is anything else on the ASX, you pay A$1,957 over a decade, and the full comparison is worth opening before you commit. If it involves US shares, the platform cannot help you at all.

Notice what is not in that list: order size, trading frequency, account balance. Those decide the answer at every other platform. Here they are almost irrelevant, because the switch is not how you trade, it is what you buy.

The account fee, and why 0.10% behaves differently

The account fee is 0.10% a year on the value held in direct shares, calculated daily and charged quarterly in arrears. There is no account fee on Vanguard products.

A per-trade fee is a fixed cost. It does not care how much you own, so it shrinks as a share of your portfolio as the portfolio grows. A percentage fee does the opposite: it grows with your balance, in dollars, every year, whether or not you trade.

Over the ten-year scenario the account fee comes to A$877, against A$1,080 of brokerage. The fee that looks like a rounding error on the pricing page ends up being nearly half the cost. On a A$50,000 direct-share holding it is A$50 a year, and it keeps accruing while you do nothing. That is the part worth sitting with: a buy-and-hold investor choosing direct ASX shares here pays a fee that scales with success, and investors who trade rarely are usually the ones a percentage fee punishes most, because there is no per-trade cost to offset it.

Free to buy, A$9 to sell

A$0 to buy a Vanguard ETF. A$9.00 flat to sell one. This is not a criticism, it is a design, and it suits a particular behaviour: it rewards accumulating and it taxes exiting. If you are building a position for twenty years, the sell leg may never happen and the asymmetry costs you nothing.

If you rebalance regularly, it does. Every rebalance has a sell leg, and every sell leg is A$9.00 per holding. A three-ETF portfolio rebalanced once a year is three sells, so A$27 a year and A$270 over a decade, on top of the A$0 you paid to build the position. That is still cheap next to most platforms, but it is not free, and the pricing page leads with the free part.

No US market, and who that rules out

Vanguard Personal Investor has no US market. Not a restricted one, not an expensive one. There is no US leg at all. That disqualifies the platform outright for a meaningful slice of readers: anyone building a global allocation through direct US-listed shares, anyone holding US shares already and wanting one account, anyone who wants to buy a US ETF directly rather than an ASX-listed equivalent.

It also means the ten-year comparison cannot be run on a like-for-like basis. Every other platform in the set has a US leg with a price attached. This one has no price because it has no product. If US exposure matters to you, that is the end of the evaluation, and it is worth knowing in the first minute rather than the last.

Auto Invest from A$200 a cycle

Auto Invest runs from A$200 per cycle, and the platform's minimum investment is A$200. The important limitation: Auto Invest does not work on direct ASX shares. It applies to Vanguard products. So the feature that makes the platform genuinely hands-off, the one that turns a monthly contribution into something you never think about, only works on the side of the platform that is already free.

For a reader whose plan is monthly Vanguard ETF purchases, that is close to ideal. For a reader who wants automated buying of individual ASX companies, the feature does not apply, and they are left placing A$9.00 orders by hand.

Who actually owns the shares

This is the section to read carefully, because the two statements below come from the same document and they do not sit easily together.

Vanguard Personal Investor is not CHESS sponsored, and there is no HIN in your name. JP Morgan Chase Bank N.A., Sydney branch, AFSL 238367, is sub-custodian of the listed securities, both the ETFs and the direct shares, and holds legal title under Vanguard's direction. FNZ Australia administers the platform, and UBS Securities Australia executes the orders. That is several parties in the chain between you and the register.

Vanguard's own Investor Guide Part A states that JP Morgan Chase Bank N.A. holds legal title to the listed securities as sub-custodian. In the same paragraph, the guide states twice that the investor is both the legal and beneficial owner. Both statements are in Vanguard's document. The tension is in the source, not in our reading of it, and we are not going to resolve it for you.

What each would mean if true: if the investor is both legal and beneficial owner, the investor holds the legal interest in the securities and the custody arrangement is administrative, with the sub-custodian holding on the investor's behalf rather than in its own right. If the sub-custodian holds legal title, the investor holds the beneficial interest and the legal interest sits with JP Morgan, which is the ordinary shape of a custodial arrangement. Those two positions cannot both be straightforwardly true of the same asset at the same time.

We are not saying one is wrong, and we are not suggesting anything about why the wording reads as it does. We are reporting what the document says. If legal ownership matters to your decision, this is the question to put to Vanguard directly before you open an account, and to get in writing.

For readers new to this, the practical difference is what a HIN gives you. With CHESS sponsorship your holding is registered to you at the ASX and you can move it to another sponsoring broker without selling. Without a HIN the holding is not registered to you at the ASX, it is not portable in that way, and recovery in a failure depends on the custody arrangements rather than on your name being on the register. Our explainer on CHESS sponsorship and your HIN walks through how that works. None of it predicts anything going wrong. It is what the structure is, and it is the trade you are making for A$0 brokerage.

Is it safe?

Vanguard Personal Investor is operated by Vanguard Investments Australia Ltd, AFSL 227263. An AFSL means the provider is licensed by ASIC, must meet conduct and disclosure obligations, and is subject to the dispute resolution arrangements that apply to licensees. What it does not do is guarantee your investments, protect you against market losses, or insure the value of the assets held.

The Financial Claims Scheme covers bank deposits up to A$250,000 per account holder per institution. It does not cover shares, at this platform or at any broker. We do not vouch for or warn against any platform. The verifiable facts are the licence, the custodian, the administrator, the executing broker and the custody model, and they are all set out above.

Where it wins, where it loses, who it suits

Where it wins

• Buying Vanguard ETFs. A$0 over ten years is unbeatable, and Superhero, the cheapest actual broker in the set, still costs A$240 over the same decade.
• Hands-off monthly investing, via Auto Invest from A$200 a cycle.
• Vanguard managed funds, which carry no brokerage to buy or sell.
• Anyone who wants the fund manager's own platform rather than a third party.

Where it loses

• Non-Vanguard ASX shares. A$1,957 over ten years, second dearest in the set, with A$877 of that being the account fee alone.
• US shares, which are not available.
• Regular rebalancing, because every sell leg costs A$9.00.
• Anyone who wants a HIN in their own name at the ASX.

It suits the investor whose entire plan is monthly Vanguard ETF purchases, held for the long term, with no US allocation and no interest in individual ASX companies. For that reader this is the cheapest option we have found, and the custody structure is the price of it.

It does not suit anyone buying individual ASX shares, anyone who wants US exposure, anyone who rebalances often, and anyone for whom a HIN and CHESS sponsorship is non-negotiable. The Pearler vs Vanguard comparison runs both schedules against each other in full.