: When you buy mutual funds through a broker, where are the shares held? This question arises from a previous one regarding managing all one's investments from one screen on a brokerage house's web site, and a recent answer

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When you buy mutual funds through a broker, where are the shares held?
This question arises from a previous one regarding managing all one's investments from one screen on a brokerage house's web site, and a recent answer by @Patches regarding segregation of the brokerage's own activities and its clients' activities.

Suppose I have a brokerage account with, say, Ameritrade, and I buy 100 shares in a Vanguard
mutual fund through the Ameritrade account.

Does this set up an account with Vanguard in my name, so that I
could, if I wanted to, log on to the Vanguard web site and buy and
sell the shares there too?
Or is it that Ameritrade has a big account in the same Vanguard
mutual fund with thousands of shares belonging to various clients,
and it buys 100 new shares for me in its Vanguard account (or
possibly transfers 100 shares to my name if someone else with an
Ameritrade account happens to be selling 100 shares that day), and
so 100 shares invested in the Vanguard mutual fund shows up on my
screen on the Ameritrade web page?

And since it is tax season again, if the Vanguard fund distributes dividends and
capital gains, do I get a 1099 from Vanguard, or are the numbers simply listed
in the 1099 from Ameritrade?

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