$4 trillion and counting, and $1 trillion and counting. Two giant asset managers just passed critical milestones.

Vanguard [profile] hit a record $4.048 trillion in AUM at the end of January, the Wall Street Journal points out. That's after pulling in 2016 net inflows of $322.8 billion (Vanguard's own tally) or $289 billion (M*'s estimate), plus another $49 billion in net inflows in January 2017. The low-cost titan is the largest mutual fund company in the world by AUM, and it's also the second-largest asset manager.

Jack Bogle The Vanguard Group Founder and Former Chief Executive Officer

Vanguard has about 15,000 employees after adding more than 1,700 full-time staff in 2016, the paper reports. And Vanguard tells the paper that they'll hire a similar number of folks this year, too.

Vanguard's last big threshold, $3 trillion, was passed in August 2014, the WSJ notes.

Meanwhile, the biggest asset manager in the world by AUM and the biggest ETF shop, BlackRock [profile], recently crossed its own critical threshold: $1 trillion in AUM in U.S. ETFs. Reuters highlighted the milestone. Last year BlackRock's iShares ETFs brought in $105 billion assets in the U.S., the wire service says, citing BlackRock and FactSet data.

As of December 31, BlackRock had $5.1 trillion in total across all of its businesses. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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