This little-known Vanguard fund has been crushing it — yes, even in this market

Bogle’s usual advice to an ordinary investor was to stick to a low-cost U.S. stock-market index fund for long-term growth, like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Admiral Shares
VTSAX,
-0.81%
fund.

But here, little known and rarely talked about, is Vanguard running what looks suspiciously like a hedge fund. And it’s crushing it.

The Vanguard Market Neutral Fund
VMNFX,
+0.83%
even posted a small gain on Thursday, when the Dow fell 1,000 points and pretty much everything fell apart.

The fund was up a third of a percentage point for the day. (Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
-1.40%
: down 5%.)

The Vanguard Market Neutral Fund is up a stellar 9.5% so far this year, even though stocks and bonds have both tanked. (The Vanguard Balanced Index Fund
VBAIX,
-0.63%,
which is 60% U.S. stocks and 40% U.S. bonds, has lost 12%.)

And Vanguard Market Neutral is up a stunning 26% over the past 12 months, while the balanced fund has lost 5%.

Hilariously, it is also handily outperforming its expensive, exclusive hedge-fund competitors. According to hedge-fund index company HFRI, the average “equity market neutral” hedge fund has done much worse than the Vanguard fund over one and three years and so far this year, too.

I was so intrigued by this very un-Vanguard Vanguard fund that I called the company and ended up speaking to Matthew Jiannino, head of product management for Vanguard’s Quantitative Equity Group.

The first thing to note is that Vanguard is edgy about calling this a “hedge fund,” because of all the connotations that phrase has: high risk and so on. This is a regulated retail mutual fund, and the operating expenses are a very low, very Bogle-friendly 0.25% a year. It does not use leverage and aims to be “risk controlled,” says Jiannino.

On the other hand, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck, and this fund is what the classic, original “hedged” funds looked like. It is “long-short,” meaning it bets on some stocks to go up (“long” in stock market jargon) and others to go down (“short”). Jiannino says the book is balanced, with the up bets and down bets of the same size, so that performance is uncorrelated with the stock-market indexes.

The fund’s recent strong run follows a period of several years when it did poorly. Like many investors, it was left behind by the skyrocketing of big technology stocks in the late 2010s.

Jiannino says the fund typically makes positive bets on higher-quality names. It’s not a “value” investor that just buys stocks in relation to today’s fundamentals, but it’s looking at companies with good growth prospects trading at a reasonable price. “We tend to have a growth tilt, but it’s a growth tilt that’s backed up by quality,” Jiannino tells me. The stocks are picked by a small, in-house quantitative team, which apparently does a better job than a lot of the Ferrari crowd in Greenwich, Conn., does.

Does this belong in a typical investor’s portfolio? Maybe not. In general, someone who wants more stability in their portfolio is usually advised to keep things simple and put some money into something like short-term bonds. Vanguard emphasizes that the Market Neutral fund is targeted at “sophisticated investors,” who might allocate “5 to 10%” of a portfolio to the fund. It can be useful, especially at times like the past year.

On the other hand, I notice the Market Neutral fund has produced a better 10-year performance than the Vanguard Short Term Bond Fund
VBIRX,
-0.30%,
and especially so far this year. The fees are astonishingly low, the headline expense ratio is over 1%, but it’s a somewhat misleading number reflecting the cost of the short or “down” bets. The operating expenses are 0.25%.

I would rather own this than most of those top-hat hedge funds, which charge an arm and a leg and deliver bupkis. When you look at the Vanguard fund you wonder how those other managers get away with their fees.