Vanguard Beacon Reviews

I’m not sure why VanguardBeacon has a high rating. Maybe someone logs in and looks at the clean UI for the landing page and calls it a day? I’m a huge fan of Vanguard, but VanguardBeacon is even less useful than the current Vanguard app. I can’t select a stock and see P/E ratios, I can’t buy options, I can’t see live bid/ask spreads, I can’t create a watchlist or see how different markets are doing. I want a dashboard (without any “community” nonsense) of what’s going on in the financial markets.

I mentioned this in my review of the Vanguard app, but if Vanguard would just copy Webull, strip off the community nonsense, and change the color to Vanguard red they’d have the best app + investment firm duo in the business, easily.

Please continue working on this, but if you want me to continue to invest in Vanguard there needs to be significant upgrades in tools. Right now VanguardBeacon and the others feel like something meant for my grandparents and not someone who is my age.

This is worrisome because new investors are going to download these apps, say what the heck is this, and then go download Robinhood or Webull and start investing immediately.

Clean interface to clearly see the top line performance of your overall portfolio on set timelines (only 1 yr, ytd, or inception options).

It’s frustrating that I can’t see a contribution or transfer detail on VanguardBeacon. It’s essential to see if a transfer from my bank or direct deposit, but I need to go to the full site to do this.

I would also like the option to view performance of individual holdings over periods of my choosing or to compare the performance of a security of fund against a common metric like the S&P 500 or my portfolio.

Unfortunately, since this has been put on my iPhone last month, I seem to have lost mobile app connection to Vanguard most of the time from my iPhone. It just gives an error message of “having difficulty, try again”. The old app just clocks and clocks, without connecting. This is very disappointing as it has been my usual point of access, but hopefully only temporary!

I tried using Beacon. First thing I tried was to do a transaction and it said it needed to send me back to the original vanguard app.

The home screen looks nice, it gives returns for 1,3,5 & 10 years but not for YTD. Maybe it just doesn’t like negative numbers!

My guess is the functionality will come in time, but no reason to use VanguardBeacon until then.

Marked upgrade from the prior app. Seems to be different experiences for different account types

Major improvement upon Vanguard Classic A++

When they say they launch VanguardBeacon early they are not lying. VanguardBeacon can’t do anything but show you your balances. Maybe add a single feature before asking for feedback?

This is just the website with a app shell around it. Why not just use the web?

Needs more development. It does not recognize devices and adapt UI accordingly.

This only works in portrait mode on the iPad. Not good. I hope an iPad version is released before this becomes the default.

I use my iPad with Magic Keyboard. VanguardBeacon in portrait mode is worthless. Need to update to allow view in landscape mode

Pretty bad. Think I will stay with older app. Older app is 1000 times more useful.