Do you own any funds (aside from Vanguard, Fidelity, D&C) that are available (with or without TF) at Schwab, or Fidelity, or TDAmeritrade, or most any other brokerage?
Then you're paying an extra fee to own those shares, whether you bought them directly or not. Funds sold through brokerages pay for shelf space. Those payments are spread across all the fund shareholders, whether they buy them direct from the distributor or via a supermarket.
The cost may be broken out as a 12b-1 fee or an account servicing fee, or it may just be buried in "other" expenses. But it's there and it's costing you money. And since you are paying that fee regardless, you might as well buy the fund through a supermarket if that is more convenient for you.

I will fully admit that for convenience’s sake I use brokerage fund supermarkets and am fully aware of the extra cost involved. If I want to pay a TF, that’s my choice and I don’t expect other fund holders to subsidize me.
But even though it would cost me the same, I would argue that buying directly from the fund would benefit the fund because the extra fees go directly to the fund not the brokerage.

“Freeloading” is in the eye of the beholder. If Vanguard, Fido, and D&C don’t want to pay Schwab its shelf fee then that’s good for their fund owners. Why should I pay extra fees because someone else wants the convenience of buying their funds through Schwab?

Do you own any funds (aside from Vanguard, Fidelity, D&C) that are available (with or without TF) at Schwab, or Fidelity, or TDAmeritrade, or most any other brokerage?
Then you're paying an extra fee to own those shares, whether you bought them directly or not. Funds sold through brokerages pay for shelf space. Those payments are spread across all the fund shareholders, whether they buy them direct from the distributor or via a supermarket.
The cost may be broken out as a 12b-1 fee or an account servicing fee, or it may just be buried in "other" expenses. But it's there and it's costing you money. And since you are paying that fee regardless, you might as well buy the fund through a supermarket if that is more convenient for you.

An investor should select a broker based on their needs and priorities.
According to Kiplinger, the three highest-ranked brokers are:
1) Fidelity
2) Charles Schwab
3) E*Trade
"To be included in our rankings, a firm must offer online trading in stocks, exchange-traded funds, mutual funds and individual bonds, which Robinhood, M1 Finance and SoFi don’t offer. T. Rowe Price and Vanguard declined to participate, as did two participants in last year’s survey, TradeStation and Wells Trade."
Link

Hasn't the value of "estimating 2019 capital gains" become zero? It's history. Same for estimating 2020 capital gains. Bring on "Estimating 2021 capital gains."

https://dailyhodl.com/2021/08/30/suspect-disappears-with-119000000-worth-of-dogecoin-in-alleged-doge-mining-scam/amp/
Dodecoin mining scam

Today the Fed (and other central banks across the globe) is part of the market.

The Fed and the stock market are for now co-dependent and planning to live in a somewhat lower interest rate world. The pandemic and the Fed's more inclusive employment mandate have further solidified this change.

Here is an article that unpacks some of the challenges embedded in my previous comment.

At stake is just how hot officials are willing to let the labor market run before they start to shut off support of cheap money.
Act too soon and the minority and less educated workers Powell now includes in the policy calculus could miss out on jobs and wage gains. Act too late and inflation could accelerate....

Fed’s Next Big Policy Debate: How to Define Maximum Employment

But FIDO hopes you've at least thought about an exit strategy. I consider this thoughtful of them.
One may imagine the message you would have received from a RobinHood account.
"Don't you want to buy some more?" "You call yourself an investor?" "Looks like a pretty chicken s#*@ trade to our system."

Robinhood: "buy more! Don't you want to earn some confetti animations and more badges!"
[producer, to the director's earpiece]: "Because RH needs the order flow since 80% of quarterly revenue came from it."

WTF are badges? I've been using RH for more than 5 years and never heard of them.
I really don't get the hate on RH. People using the platform do benefit from PFOF in aggregate; I've also used Fidelity for 10+ years and have cumulatively saved less than $1 for "price improvements" because of their "better" execution.

Fido posted this Exit Strategies page in their Learning Center since 11/17/20.
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/trading/exit-strategies
Uncertain what Robinhood offers their investors gamblers.

If Vanguard has spent $1B on technology the results are thus far invisible to me, as in absolutely no difference over the past few years (except for glitches they have had to reverse).

I personally have not seen any technology updates which have improved my Vanguard experience.

I have never tried the short game. If you pull up the DOG performance chart on M* you'll see the fund has had one year in the black since 2011, while $10K invested in DOG dwindled to $1000+ while the index tracking the Dow grew to almost $46K. Then again, what @hank is doing has nothing to do with long-term investing.

A short South China Morning Post article with a few examples of how these terms are being put to work by Chinese regulators. The depth, breadth, and expected duration of the crackdown somewhat surprise me. But, suspect most Chinese businesses will adapt and continue to thrive. Still have the shares of MEGMX (30% China/Hong Kong per latest report) purchased when it opened for trading in mid spring 2020. Nothing so far is making me think about selling.
Xi Jinping says Big Tech crackdown is making progress, calls for Communist Party to ‘guide’ companies

+1 hank

Yesterday I opened a very small short inverse position on the Dow using DOG. I fully understand the dangers inherent in such an approach. Today I get this email …
“Now that you’ve placed a trade, don’t forget about the next important step – your exit strategy.
Having a plan from the start can help you: Take potential profits if you’ve reached your target gains.
Help manage potential losses by predetermining when to sell. Setting an exit plan for your latest trade doesn’t have to be complicated and Fidelity can help. Define and set one today.”
For my inspiration …

The line item in the table is not well labeled. If you read the text, you'll see that this item is growth in profits, not profits.
Company profits are distributed to investors in two ways that are summed:
1. Dividends
2. Stock appreciation
For simplicity, assume no multiple expansion and no inflation.
Whatever a company earns is either distributed to investors as dividends or plowed back into the company to grow profits. With a constant multiplier, the growth in those profits results in the same percentage growth in the price of stock. Thus in theory the investor receives all the profits one way or another.
Of course this assumes that the company makes good use of the money. If it's known to squander cash (or just sit on it), multiples will contract, since the cash isn't being used to generate future profits.

The King of Buy & Hold

John Templeton once said, "History shows that time, not timing, is the key to investment success. Therefore, the best time to buy stocks is when you have money"

...few people invest in such a way as to give themselves the best chance of multiplying their capital because they're always, as the cliche runs, pulling up the plant to look at the roots.

Nick-Train-The-King-of-Buy-and-Hold

RCTIX seems to be TF at all 5 brokerages I checked, for brevity sake: F V S TDA and E-Trade. TDA wins the Awful Award for combining a tf with a $100,000 minimum !

Meanwhile, Fidelity’s on hiring binge.
Re TRP …
- One might attribute the poor customer support to Covid restrictions. I accepted that for nearly a year before recognizing their problems were deeper seated. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to uncover if in recent years perhaps they’ve out-sourced their phone support? I ask because 10-15 years back it was fairly easy to get kicked up to a manager. And usually that resulted in substantive results - be it a direct from the top answer about operations or resolution of some personal beef. But in recent years there seemed no continuity to the phone support operations. As others may have noted, sometimes different reps appear to be working at cross-purpose.
- The “nasties” in customer support seem apart from their outstanding investing capabilities. And their stock price has soared - up about 35% YTD by one report . If you can save $$ on the customer support, that’s extra cash in the pockets of investors in the company.

If Vanguard has spent $1B on technology the results are thus far invisible to me, as in absolutely no difference over the past few years (except for glitches they have had to reverse). Meanwhile they have been disinvesting in customer service. Backasswards is right.

Investors are “asking for significant returns, and what we are seeing, perhaps because of the cultural fit between the U.K. and the U.S., is a lot of the P.E. money from the U.S. is finding homes in the U.K.,”

business/private-equity-uk
Anyone have a favorite UK Fund? My apologies for cursing, but check out DFUKX.