Oh how times have changed. Vanguard, the 800-pound gorilla of the mutual fund industry, is rapidly approaching its 50th birthday. We thought it would be interesting to see how the firm has grown through the years:

At the beginning Vanguard managed $1.5 billion in assets. Today that number has ballooned to $4.5 trillion. That’s 3x the GDP of Canada. Wow!

That $1.5 billion represented at the time about 6% of assets held and managed by the mutual fund industry. Today Vanguard’s share is just shy of 25%.

While the name Vanguard has become synonymous with indexing that wasn’t always the case. At the beginning less than 1% of money at Vanguard was invested in a fund tracking an index. Today that figure is over 77%.

Today there are 149 Vanguard mutual funds from which to choose. At its founding the mutual fund complex offered less than 10.

Possibly the most interesting statistic relates to net cash flow. Last year Vanguard took in $359 billion. In its first year of operation investors actually pulled more money from the firm than they put in amounting to a net outflow of $108 million.