Ivanna Hampton: Vanguard is evolving as it grows bigger while keeping its investor-first reputation intact. Investing Insights recently examined the 2026 outlook for the large asset manager in a two-part series. I spoke with Dan Sotiroff on April 8, 2026. Here’s what the Vanguard analyst and associate director of US passive strategies research for Morningstar had to say about the firm.Hampton: Vanguard has recently partnered with TIAA to launch a target-date fund series with guaranteed income. Can you talk about that?Sotiroff: The guaranteed income is really coming by way of an annuity, which is sort of an insurance contract that gives you this regular payment. I think most people are kind of familiar with the concept. What this would look like is there’s an option for investors in a target-date fund to annuitize some or all of that target-date fund’s assets when they get to retirement. It’s new to Vanguard, I should say, but not really new to target-date funds. Some of their competitors have solutions like this already out there with varying degrees of flexibility. Safe to say it’s pretty cheap, Vanguard being Vanguard. So, why do this? I think it’s kind of a smaller step toward that bigger question of how to turn an investment portfolio into a paycheck, which is a really, really difficult question to answer for a lot of people.I don’t know if there’s a great answer. It’s one of the hardest problems in finance to solve because everybody’s a little bit different. Everybody has different savings, different life goals, et cetera. It’s tough, but it’s kind of a baby step. It’s a small step toward trying to solve that problem. The other thing I’ll say is this would be a new target-date series. It doesn’t sound like Vanguard is going to mess with its current target-date series. It’s very successful. It’s got hundreds of billions of dollars in it, so I don’t think they want to do too much with that there. It’s working very well for the people that are in it. The other thing here is I’m under the impression that this is going to be available as a collective investment trust, or a CIT. It’s not going to be in mutual fund format, so that limits it to large 401(k) plans, that type of thing, which is really where it should be used, I think. That’s just some of the additional details around there that we’ve learned.Hampton: Now, Vanguard’s also collaborating with Wellington and Blackstone to combine public and private assets into multi-asset investments. What do you make of this, and does this fit in Vanguard’s mission?Sotiroff: Vanguard’s role so far has been pretty passive, to pardon the pun. The fund is actually going to be managed by Wellington, at least talking about the WVB All Markets Fund. It’s basically supplying the publicly traded stocks and bonds to this multi-asset portfolio that’s also going to hold some private equity and some private credit. I think the fees came out on those. I don’t have them readily available off the top of my head. It’s also hard to compare fees because each one of these types of funds that comes out is slightly different in terms of what it’s doing and the asset exposure that it has. It’s hard to compare apples to apples and say one is cheaper than the other, but I think your other question is fair. Does this fit with Vanguard’s mission?This one I’m OK with because again, it’s a Wellington fund. They’re not really doing a whole lot in private assets. I think the bigger picture here is that it sort of opens the door for Vanguard to maybe start exploring private assets. There’s problems that come with that. I think private investments have gotten a bad rap, and rightfully so, because the fees are high and they’re very complicated. We’re trying to figure out some of the fee structure and these things, and it’s very difficult to do. I think Jack Shannon has written on that. Bryan Armour, I sit next to him; he rants about it every once in a while. There are also a lot of questionable practices about how the assets in these things are valued. There are a lot of question marks about how these funds are just way too stable given what they hold. There are a lot of things there.Now that said, there’s a lot of room for disruption. There’s a lot of just bad practices going on in that side of the industry. I think that’s potentially an opportunity for Vanguard if it chooses to get in there. Some of those problems are really difficult to solve, and they’re really thorny, but if they could figure that out and give investors who actually want that type of exposure a better, cheaper, more cost-effective ride, that could potentially fit into their mission. Now, this isn’t going to be for everybody. It’s not something that I think is going to fit into everybody’s portfolio, but we’ll see. I don’t want to be rushing to judgments here. We still have to kind of see what they come out with. We know they’re working on some things in the background, so I’ll save my judgments for when we learn more.