Vanguard Dividend Growth’s Longtime Manager to Step Down in 2024

Vanguard Dividend Growth VDIGX has officially begun a leadership transition, the firm announced on March 23, 2023. Effective Jan. 1, 2024, manager Donald Kilbride will step down from the strategy’s helm, and comanager Peter Fisher will step up. The strategy, which carried a High People rating, a High Process rating, and a Morningstar Analyst Rating of Gold, has been placed under review.

While Vanguard only recently added Fisher to the prospectus in July 2022, he has played a key role on subadvisor Wellington’s dividend-growth team for many years and has worked closely with Kilbride on this strategy as well as sibling strategies for more than a decade. The two have an excellent track record of succession planning thus far. Fisher took over the Wellington Global Dividend Growth separate-account strategy from Kilbride in 2016, and its composite delivered stellar total and risk-adjusted returns on a trailing three-, five-, and 10-year basis through December 2022.

Kilbride is among the industry’s most talented investors. His steady hand has been fundamental to the success of this strategy, whose risk-adjusted results since his 2006 start are impressive. Since then through February 2023, the Sharpe ratio of the U.S.-domiciled mutual fund’s lone share class topped all surviving peers in the large-blend Morningstar Category, and the share class’ 9.9% annualized total return beat 97% of rivals.

Kilbride has no plans to separate from the firm or retire from the industry after January 2024. He will remain on Wellington’s dividend-growth team and continue leading Vanguard Advice Select Dividend Growth VADGX, which is a more concentrated version of this strategy available to clients enrolled in certain Vanguard advisory programs.