Vanguard Global Wellington Fund Admiral Shares VGWAX

Vanguard Global Wellington’s disciplined asset allocation and rigorous approach to security selection help it stand out among peers, underscoring a Process Pillar upgrade to High from Above Average. The fund is a top choice for investors seeking a globally diversified, balanced portfolio at a compelling price.

Lead managers Nataliya Kofman and Loren Moran wield this fund’s distinctive approach. Kofman has been the sole manager of the equity sleeve since the fund’s 2017 inception and co-leads Wellington’s global quality value team. She is a 20-year Wellington veteran and has an impressive record running a separately managed account that mirrors this fund’s equity sleeve since 2009. Moran joined the firm and the team in 2014, has comanaged the fund since inception, and took charge of the bond sleeve in 2021 following a multiyear transition that saw seasoned managers retire in 2019 and 2021. Both managers benefit from Wellington’s deep ecosystem of central research teams and portfolio management teams.

Kofman and Moran oversee the fund’s 65% equity/35% fixed-income strategic allocations, which can shift by up to 5 percentage points, but have kept them within 2 percentage points over their shared tenure. Anticipating short-term stock or bond outperformance is challenging to get consistently right. Maintaining a disciplined allocation ensures the team’s strength in security selection, rather than asset allocation, will drive returns, and this practice has been a boon for long-term fundholders.

Kofman and her team center their approach around rigorous fundamental analysis to understand the ins and outs of a business, aiming to uncover resilient companies with sustained dividends at attractive valuations. Those company-level insights are key inputs to their distinctive proprietary scorecard that plays a role in idea generation, portfolio construction, and risk management while grounding the team in their philosophy and ensuring repeatability.

The fixed-income team invests across global bond markets to build a portfolio with three goals: act as ballast to the equity sleeve, produce income, and provide liquidity. The team emphasizes corporate credit, which typically soaks up 60% of the sleeve. Diligent bottom-up research has historically led the team to stable issuers with solid fundamentals. Outside of corporate credit, asset-backed securities and taxable municipal bonds generally account for around 20%, with the remainder in US Treasuries and agency securities.

Greater conviction in this fund’s disciplined, rigorous approach drives a Process Pillar upgrade to High from Above Average.

Disciplined top-down management and consistent, rigorously applied approaches across the equity and fixed-income sleeves help this fund stand out. Lead managers Nataliya Kofman and Loren Moran keep the fund’s allocations close to its 65% equity and 35% fixed-income benchmark, not straying beyond 2 percentage points despite 5 percentage points of flexibility in either direction. That discipline allows security selection to take center stage, playing to the team’s strength in bottom-up analysis.

In the equity sleeve, Kofman seeks market leaders with healthy balance sheets, stable cash flows, and a demonstrated commitment to dividends, which the team views as a reliable proxy for quality. The team members are long-term investors who develop deep insight into companies and their competitive positioning, adding stocks to the portfolio at attractive relative valuations. A distinctive proprietary scorecard helps quantify fundamental insights, playing a key role in idea generation and portfolio construction while bringing structure to the approach.

The bond team oversees a flexible, globally diversified portfolio that typically invests around 60% in corporate debt and 20% in taxable municipal bonds and asset-backed securities. The remainder is in Treasuries and agency securities for liquidity management. It is credit-heavy but composed entirely of investment-grade fare. The bond team’s in-depth research on individual issuers informs security selection and sector allocations, while duration positioning reflects macro views.

The equity portfolio typically holds 70-90 stocks and tilts toward resilient large-cap companies with competitive long-term advantages and moderate valuations. For example, the equity sleeve had 54% of the portfolio allocated to firms with wide moats as of March 2026, higher than the average peer’s 47%. The team’s philosophy leads to a persistent bias to value stocks, which soaked up 53% of the equity portfolio compared with 34% for the average peer. This can lead to underperformance during growth-led markets, like in 2024. Non-US stocks have historically been between 40% and 50% of the equity sleeve. That allocation stands at 46%, around 5 percentage points above the Morningstar Category average and 18 percentage points above its FTSE Developed Index benchmark, so the fund could lag during periods when US stocks are outperforming non-US stocks but benefit when non-US stocks are in favor, like in 2025.

The fixed-income portfolio reflects its global opportunity set, typically investing between 30% and 40% in non-US bonds. Its 58% weighting in corporate credit as of March 2026 stands out compared with the category average of 32%. Though it’s all investment-grade, this fund takes on more credit risk than Vanguard Wellington, allocating around 32% of the sleeve to BBB rated issues versus 16% in its sibling fund. The team has found value in global BBB rated bonds and sees them as an important diversifier. Duration has historically been higher than the category average; it was 5.9 years versus the average peer’s 4.8 years as of March 2026, but the team generally keeps it within a year of its custom benchmark.

Two adept managers supported by Wellington’s formidable research resources anchor an Above Average People rating.

Nataliya Kofman has guided the equity sleeve since the fund’s 2017 inception. She joined Wellington in 2006 after finishing her MBA at Harvard University and worked closely with Edward Bousa, longtime manager of Vanguard Wellington, until his retirement in 2020. Kofman shares a similar philosophy and has overseen a separately managed account that mirrors this fund’s equity sleeve since 2009; it also touts a strong track record. She is a senior managing director at the firm and co-leads the global quality value equity team. Portfolio manager Matthew Baker, who isn’t a named manager on this fund, and analyst Alan Leite support Kofman, and they leverage Wellington’s team of nearly 60 global industry analysts.

On the bond side, portfolio manager Loren Moran joined the team in 2014 and became the sole manager responsible for the fixed-income sleeve in July 2021 after comanager Michael Stack retired. They had been comanagers since 2017, along with long-serving lead John Keogh, who retired in 2019. Portfolio manager Rachel Chong, who isn’t a named manager on this fund, supports Moran. Chong joined in 2025 from Wellington’s global credit team after former team member Noah Atlas moved to a different team within the firm. As Atlas did, Chong works closely with Moran on investment-grade credit selection. Another team member, Lei Zhu, left the firm in 2025 after only joining in early 2024. While this turnover isn’t ideal, the team is still on a strong footing under Moran’s leadership.

Vanguard maintains its High Parent Pillar rating as it continues to grow under new leadership.

CEO Salim Ramji has had a busy first year captaining Vanguard’s crew, and the ship remains pointed in the right direction. The firm made its largest round of fee cuts in early 2025, which came at an estimated cost of USD 350 million. It established a separate division dedicated to its advice and wealth management efforts, a sign that it wants to seriously compete within those lines of business. Asset growth has continued to be a huge success. Only BlackRock’s inflows rival the money Vanguard is taking in. Likewise, the number of clients it serves has more than doubled since 2015.

Despite that success, an ever-growing number of clients has presented a challenge: Vanguard can’t grow its services fast enough to keep up with demand. In some instances, it has had to curb certain services and capabilities or raise fees on others to cope, causing some loyal clients to criticize what they perceive as deteriorating services.

Vanguard has ambitions to bring its disruptive legacy to the bond market. It created roughly a dozen low-cost bond exchange-traded funds for US investors and several others abroad over the 12 months through June 2025. All have low fees in their respective categories, and the actively managed strategies align with Vanguard’s philosophy. They are relatively easy to understand and are conservatively managed.

Vanguard has another opportunity to prove that clients are still its priority. On the surface, its endeavor into the high-fee deal-making world of private assets alongside Wellington and Blackstone looks like a cultural mismatch. So far, the collaboration hasn’t produced anything that’s concerning.

The fund has built a strong track record since its inception. Through March 2026, the admiral share class delivered an 8.2% annualized gain, topping 94.0% of global moderate-allocation category peers and the Morningstar Moderate Target Risk Index’s 6.7%. The fund’s Sharpe ratio, a measure of risk-adjusted return, also fell in the top decile, reflecting not just solid returns but lower volatility than the category median since inception. The equity sleeve mirrors Wellington Quality Value, a separately managed account that equity manager Nataliya Kofman has helmed since 2009, which has outpaced its FTSE Developed Index benchmark by over 100 basis points through March 2026. That represents a durable edge, especially given the portfolio’s value tilt through the growth-led markets of the 2010s and 2020s.

The fund’s ability to play defense in tough markets has been a boon for fundholders. During 2022’s simultaneous stock and bond market downturns, the fund fell 7.0% for the year, shallower than the category median and benchmark’s declines of 14.9% and 14.8%, respectively. Defensive positioning within the bond sleeve and the equity sleeve’s value orientation, with growth stocks out of favor, helped the fund better weather the storm. That said, growth-led rallies like in 2023 and 2024 can challenge the fund; it underperformed peers and benchmarks in both years. Still, the fund roared back in 2025, with a 17.5% gain that beat the peer median and benchmark returns by at least 155 basis points on the back of strong security selection and the equity sleeve’s lean toward non-US stocks, which outperformed US stocks that year.

Vanguard Global Wellington Admiral's Prospectus Adjusted Expense Ratio is 0.3% per year. It places it in the cheapest quintile of the Morningstar US Fund Global Moderate Allocation Category, where the median fee is 0.94% per year. This cost positioning translates into a Medalist Rating Price Score of 2.35, which reflects its relative price positioning within the category. The Price Score ranges from -2.50 (most expensive) to +2.50 (cheapest), with higher scores indicating better cost competitiveness.