Vanguard 4+

I rarely write reviews, but in light of recent events, I think it’s time to give credit to the Vanguard Group for being one of the few who did not try to suppress the common man from participating in the “free market” during one of the greatest transferences of wealth in our history. Many other platforms participated in protecting the interests of the super wealthy, and pretending they had the interests of small retail investors in mind. It’s OUR money, we know what the risks are! (at least most of us do). Ethics and morals aside, I will say the app itself could use certain improvements, even the site itself. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to buy or sell options through the app, the actual website must be used. I also wish their platform was able to refresh market prices at a much faster rate, to execute better orders at any given moment. If Vanguard can add a touch of modern or advanced tools for more experienced traders, that would be the icing on the cake. Overall, this is a stand up brokerage firm. Give them your business, no regrets yet.

The old version of the app was quite good, easy to look at, easy to find useful information, and had lots of reliable functionality. The new version is hard to look at, hard to navigate, and is unreliable. Today, for example, I tried to perform a withdrawal to a bank checking account, but the app listed two checking accounts at the same bank, even though there is only one. This confused me and I had to double check a paper statement to see which number was the checking account (later using the Vanguard website, I found that one of the accounts was nicknamed “savings” but the app mislabeled it as “checking”). After choosing the real checking account, the app hung and indicated there was problem. There was no transaction for a pending withdrawal listed on the app but I noticed that my Vanguard account value was reduced. I therefore quit and relaunched to app, and sure enough there was now a pending withdrawal scheduled to the bank checking account. This is pretty scary behavior by the app for such a fundamental function. I’m planning to use the web site for transactions in the future. The older version of the app and website were so much better, but now they are gone and I have no idea why they were replaced with junk.

I can not agree more with all the 1 star reviews from around Nov to Dec 2021, this new interface they have is very lacking. Honestly the app before was kind of outdated looking, but it was very robust. If you’re a daily user like me, all the features you needed are there.

The nicest thing about the old version was there’s always a filter button to customize whatever you’re looking at. Whether you’re looking at the cost basis, performance returns, transactions history, you can always filter it to show by fund(s), by account(s), or whatever custom way you want. You can do year to date, month to day, any random date range. YOU CAN’T DO THAT IN THE NEW UPDATE.

I get they were trying to add a “modern” look to the app and I applaud them for trying but it’s missing some really basic feature. I miss being able to just use the app for a lot of my research instead of having to log into the website just to be able to filter for basic information like dividends for the year only for non-retirement accounts. If the tech team at Vanguard even cares about these reviews , please please please either give the customers the option to switch back to the old version while they iron out the new look or at the very least just add back the filter button to transaction history.