By Kunal Mehta @ Shutterstock.com
After six years leading Vanguard, Tim Buckley is resigning. Jack Pitcher reports in The Wall Street Journal:
Vanguard Group Chief Executive Mortimer J. “Tim” Buckley will retire by year-end, the company said Thursday, capping a six-year tenure during which the investment manager’s assets increased more than 80%.
Buckley was tasked with expanding a firm that was already a behemoth when he took over in 2018. Now with $9 trillion in assets under management, Vanguard is the second-largest money manager in the world after BlackRock. It has largely built itself by offering some of the lowest-cost funds in the industry.
Vanguard said it is conducting a selection process for its next CEO. Greg Davis, who was previously chief investment officer, was promoted to president.
Buckley steered Vanguard through a tricky political environment for asset managers, who have received criticism from the left and right for how they use the increasing power they wield in shareholder votes.
Vanguard managed to avoid much of the controversy over environmental, social and governance investing that has afflicted its largest competitors. Buckley distanced the firm from ESG investing, telling reporters that Vanguard’s research showed ESG didn’t have an advantage over broad-based investing.
The company withdrew from an alliance known as the Net Zero Asset Managers in 2022. Other asset managers received pushback from oil-producing states because of their involvement in alliances that support the goal of reaching net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
Vanguard continued its conservative, follow-the-market approach to investing under Buckley’s leadership. Competitors recently launched popular exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin, but Vanguard has said it has no such plans and won’t offer crypto-related products on its brokerage platform. The asset-management giant called bitcoin “more of a speculation than an investment” in a recent blog post.
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