A weekend NY Times article describes Vanguard's exceptional growth. In the last three calendar years, investors sank $823B into Vanguard funds, in a scale that becomes clear when it is compared with the rest of the mutual fund industry - more than 4,000 firms in total. All of them combined took in just a net $97B during that period, Morningstar data shows. Vanguard, in other words, scooped up about 8.5x as much money as all of its competitors. Vanguard’s assets under management have skyrocketed to $4.2T from $1T seven years ago, according to the company, with ~$3T invested in passive index-based strategies and the rest in funds that rely on an active approach to picking stocks and bonds.