If Bogle is selling he should charge more than 5 basis points for it! And maybe structure the company so he holds a big chunk of it rather than giving it away to the fund holders.
Vanguard holds $3 Trillion dollars at an average expense ratio of 0.24%. This is $7.2 Billion in management fees per year. At a 30% profit margin similar the Black Rock they would be making 2.2 B in earnings per year. This easily equates to 30B+ market cap if Vanguard were a public company. They may be shareholder owned and doing good in the world, but rest assured they are selling something.
Got a source for that data? Average ER is 0.18%, and that is just talking all the funds ERs and dividing by the number of funds. Since their biggest funds also tend to be the cheapest when you look at the average ER based on assets it is even lower. They also run at-cost. No profits.... They sell their funds because they think more people should benefit from lower expenses, not because they want to make billions in profits. Look at the size of Vanguard compared to Fidelity, and then look at the Net Worth of Bogle VS the family that owns Fidelity... and tell me he isn't a saint.
On to the dividend aristocrats index. Consider what would happen in the index when a company decided to stop paying dividends... and then what would happen in reality. If a company declares it isn't paying dividends anymore its out of the index. At the time that the company made that announcement the expected dividend stream was likely priced into the stock price. Now the stock price drops, but the index has already removed it from the index so the drop isn't included. You the trader will be competing against every other trader trying to dump it at the same time. This would explain why SDY and similar funds don't track the index very well. Just to give you a list of companies this happened with....
Bank of America in 2008, BB&T bank in 2009, Comerica Financial in 2008, Fifth Third bank in 2008, US bancorp in 2009, First Horizon bank in 2008, Gannett company in 2009, General Electric in 2009, Johnson Controls in 2008, KeyBank in 2009, Legg Masons investments in 2009, M&T bank in 2009, Nucor Steel in 2008, Progressive Insurance in 2008, Regions Financial in 2008, etc.
2 years worth of companies, and I didn't even list every company from those 2 years. I left out the companies I figured no one would recognize. The whole list of companies removed for all years is insanely long. Now the index doesn't have to worry about the price dropping off a cliff and zero liquidity on the day they remove a stock from the index. However if you owned all those banks in 2008-2009 imagine 'you' trying to sell those stocks on the day that they announced they weren't paying dividends and everyone else is selling them at the exact same time.
I'm going to create an index that adds every company the microsecond they post higher than expected earnings and removes every company the microsecond they post lower than expected earnings. Sounds great right! Replicating it however...