Anyone Going to the Vanguard Funds Annual Shareholder Meeting?

Photo credit: Parker Knight, CC BY 2.0.

Last December, I opened a Roth IRA with Capital One Investing—and this week, they sent me an email inviting me to participate in the Vanguard Funds Annual Shareholder Meeting.

I logged into my investment account and read the official invitation from Vanguard CEO F. William McNabb, III:

On behalf of the Boards of Trustees, I’m pleased to announce all Vanguard funds will hold a Joint Special Meeting of Shareholders on November 15, 2017, at the DoubleTree Paradise Valley in Scottsdale, Arizona. All shareholders have an opportunity to vote on proposals that affect their funds. Your vote is very important. I urge you to review the enclosed information carefully and then vote either by Internet, mail, phone, or in person at the meeting.

I am very curious to see what would happen if I showed up at the DoubleTree Paradise Valley in November, but I’m not willing to drop several hundred bucks on finding out. Instead, I’ll vote like I do most everything else in life: on the internet.

The voting information PDF is super-long, so I am neither going to study it nor make my vote today. (After all, I gotta get ready to go on vacation!)

But, for all of you who’ve had these types of investment accounts for longer than I have, do you vote on this stuff? Do you study the enormous PDFs and carefully consider the pros and cons, or do you just click the options labeled “Board Recommends?”

Or… do you ignore and/or archive those invitations and get on with your life?

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