This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

To some degree, a face-off between Vanguard and Fidelity is really a face-off between John Bogle, Vanguard's founder, and Peter Lynch, Fidelity's star fund manager. While Bogle was a pioneer in no-load and low-cost investing in index funds, Lynch was a proponent of investing in "what you know," or getting investing ideas from your day-to-day life. BloggingStocks covered this Bogle vs. Lynch match up back in September, and readers gave the financial edge to Lynch.

Privately held Fidelity Investments is made up by two independent but closely cooperating companies: Boston-based Fidelity Management and Research LLC serves the North American market, and Fidelity International Limited (FIL), spun off in 1969, provides investment products and services to clients in the rest of the world. Fidelity reported revenue of $12.87 billion in 2006, by offering a large family of mutual funds, as well as providing discount brokerage services, retirement services, estate planning, wealth management, securities execution and clearance, life insurance, and a number of other financial services. The founding Johnson family still controls Fidelity, but Peter Lynch and some other fund managers also hold stakes in the company.

Headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, the Vanguard Group offers mutual funds and other financial products and services to individual and institutional investors, and manages approximately $1.3 trillion in assets. Vanguard is unusual among mutual-fund companies in that it is owned by the funds themselves. Each fund contributes capital toward shared management, marketing, and distribution services. The company claims that this structure better orients management toward shareholder interests.

When founder John C. Bogle was an undergraduate at Princeton, he conducted a study in which he found that around three-quarters of mutual funds failed to earn more money than if they invested in the largest 500 companies, using the S&P 500 stock market index as a benchmark. The first index fund for individual investors, the Vanguard 500, has outperformed many other competing mutual funds.

Though Bogle retired from Vanguard as chairman in 1999, the company has continued to follow his emphasis on index funds and low expenses for share owners.

Does Peter Lynch and Fidelity still hold the edge in this match up? Or would you give the nod to John Bogle's Vanguard? In Money Magazine's recent list of the best mutual funds to invest in right now, of the top ten, four of them were Vanguard funds and only one was from Fidelity.

Vote in our poll for Vanguard or Fidelity as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.