Vanguard Investor and Admiral Shares Different $/Share??!!

[SwordGuy]

I owned some VHDYX (investor shares).   Got a notice they could become admiral shares so I said to do it.


Got the confirmation notice today and instead of 800 some shares at about $34 each I had about 1100 shares at about $26 each.  (Too lazy to look up the exact numbers 'cause it really doesn't matter.)


I figured maybe I got lucky and the price had changed between sell and buy, but that didn't make sense to me since my understanding was this was the same fund.  It should have been just an administrative change.    I would have been lucky this time but next time I might not be lucky so I did some digging.

It turns out the share prices for VHDYX and VHYAX are different!   But they are the same fund!   


Huh???

[dandarc]

BRK.A and BRK.B have different prices too.

Different classes of shares trade at different prices. Particularly with mutual funds, where you wind up with fractional shares down to 4 decimal places and everything is priced once per day at net asset value, it really doesn't matter what the "per-share price" is at all.

[Indexer]

Mutual funds trade in dollars, not whole shares(like stocks). The share price is just used for accounting purposes. Whether you have 1000 $100 shares or 100 $1000 shares is meaningless.

What's your balance?  That's the thing to look at.