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An index fund (also index tracker) is a
mutual fund A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities. The term is typically used in the United States, Canada, and India, while similar structures across the globe include the SICAV i ...
or
exchange-traded fund An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund and exchange-traded product, i.e. they are traded on stock exchanges. ETFs are similar in many ways to mutual funds, except that ETFs are bought and sold from other owners throughout the ...
(ETF) designed to follow certain preset rules so that the fund can a specified basket of underlying investments.Reasonable Investor(s), Boston University Law Review, available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2579510 While index providers often emphasize that they are for-profit organizations, index providers have the ability to act as "reluctant regulators" when determining which companies are suitable for an index. Those rules may include tracking prominent
indexes Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...
like the
S&P 500 The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices. As of D ...
or the
Dow Jones Industrial Average The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), Dow Jones, or simply the Dow (), is a stock market index of 30 prominent companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. The DJIA is one of the oldest and most commonly followed equity inde ...
or implementation rules, such as tax-management, tracking error minimization, large block trading or patient/flexible trading strategies that allow for greater tracking error but lower market impact costs. Index funds may also have rules that screen for social and sustainable criteria. An index fund's rules of construction clearly identify the type of companies suitable for the fund. The most commonly known index fund in the United States, the S&P 500 Index Fund, is based on the rules established by
S&P Dow Jones Indices S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC () is a joint venture between S&P Global, the CME Group, and News Corp that was announced in 2011 and later launched in 2012. It produces, maintains, licenses, and markets stock market indices as benchmarks and as th ...
for their
S&P 500 Index The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices. As of D ...
. Equity index funds would include groups of stocks with similar characteristics such as the size, value, profitability and/or geographic location of the companies. A group of stocks may include companies from the United States, Non-US Developed,
emerging markets An emerging market (or an emerging country or an emerging economy) is a market that has some characteristics of a developed market, but does not fully meet its standards. This includes markets that may become developed markets in the future or were ...
or
Frontier Market A frontier market is a term for a type of developing country's market economy which is more developed than a least developed country's, but too small, risky, or illiquid to be generally classified as an emerging market economy. The term is an econ ...
countries. Additional index funds within these geographic markets may include indexes of companies that include rules based on company characteristics or factors, such as companies that are small, mid-sized, large, small value, large value, small growth, large growth, the level of gross profitability or investment capital, real estate, or indexes based on commodities and fixed-income. Companies are purchased and held within the index fund when they meet the specific index rules or parameters and are sold when they move outside of those rules or parameters. Think of an index fund as an investment utilizing rules-based investing. Some index providers announce changes of the companies in their index before the change date whilst other index providers do not make such announcements. The main advantage of index funds for investors is they don't require much time to manage as the investors don't have to spend time analyzing various stocks or stock portfolios. Most investors also find it difficult to beat the performance of the S&P 500 Index. Some legal scholars have previously suggested a value maximization and agency-costs theory for understanding index funds stewardship. One index provider, Dow Jones Indexes, has 130,000 indices. Dow Jones Indexes says that all its products are maintained according to clear, unbiased, and systematic methodologies that are fully integrated within index families. , index funds made up 20.2% of equity mutual fund assets in the US. Index domestic equity mutual funds and index-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs), have benefited from a trend towards more index-oriented investment products. From 2007 through 2014, index domestic equity mutual funds and ETFs received $1 trillion in new net cash, including reinvested dividends. Index-based domestic equity ETFs have grown particularly quickly, attracting almost twice the flows of index domestic equity mutual funds since 2007. In contrast, actively managed domestic equity mutual funds experienced a net outflow of $659 billion, including reinvested dividends, from 2007 to 2014.


Origins

The first theoretical model for an index fund was suggested in 1960 by Edward Renshaw and Paul Feldstein, both students at the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
. While their idea for an "Unmanaged Investment Company" garnered little support, it did start off a sequence of events in the 1960s. Qualidex Fund, Inc., a Florida Corporation, chartered on 05/23/1967 (317247) by Richard A. Beach (BSBA Banking and Finance, University of Florida, 1957) and joined by Walton D. Dutcher Jr., filed a registration statement (2-38624) with the SEC on October 20, 1970 which became effective on July 31, 1972. "The fund organized as an open-end, diversified investment company whose investment objective is to approximate the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Stock Average", thereby becoming the first index fund. In 1973,
Burton Malkiel Burton Gordon Malkiel (born August 28, 1932) is an American economist and writer most noted for his classic finance book '' A Random Walk Down Wall Street'' (first published 1973, in its 12th edition as of 2019). He is a leading proponent of the e ...
wrote ''
A Random Walk Down Wall Street ''A Random Walk Down Wall Street'', written by Burton Gordon Malkiel, a Princeton University economist, is a book on the subject of stock markets which popularized the random walk hypothesis. Malkiel argues that asset prices typically exhibit s ...
'', which presented academic findings for the lay public. It was becoming well known in the popular financial press that most mutual funds were not beating the market indices. Malkiel wrote:
John Bogle John Clifton "Jack" Bogle (May 8, 1929 – January 16, 2019) was an American investor, business magnate, and philanthropist. He was the founder and chief executive of The Vanguard Group, and is credited with creating the index fund. An avid inve ...
graduated from
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
in 1951, where his senior thesis was titled: "The Economic Role of the Investment Company". Bogle wrote that his inspiration for starting an index fund came from three sources, all of which confirmed his 1951 research:
Paul Samuelson Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "h ...
's 1974 paper, "Challenge to Judgment"; Charles Ellis' 1975 study, "The Loser's Game"; and Al Ehrbar's 1975 ''Fortune'' magazine article on indexing. Bogle founded
The Vanguard Group The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, with about $7 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 13, 2021. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-la ...
in 1974; as of 2009 it was the largest mutual fund company in the United States. Bogle started the First Index Investment Trust on December 31, 1975. At the time, it was heavily derided by competitors as being "un-American" and the fund itself was seen as "Bogle's folly". In the first five years of Bogle's company, it made 17 million dollars.
Fidelity Investments Fidelity Investments, commonly referred to as Fidelity, earlier as Fidelity Management & Research or FMR, is an American multinational financial services corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was established in 1946 and is on ...
Chairman Edward Johnson was quoted as saying that he " ouldn'tbelieve that the great mass of investors are going to be satisfied with receiving just average returns". Bogle's fund was later renamed the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which tracks the Standard and Poor's 500 Index. It started with comparatively meager assets of $11 million but crossed the $100 billion milestone in November 1999; this astonishing increase was funded by the market's increasing willingness to invest in such a product. Bogle predicted in January 1992 that it would very likely surpass the
Magellan Fund The Fidelity Magellan Fund () is a U.S.-domiciled mutual fund from the Fidelity family of funds. It is perhaps the world's best-known actively managed mutual fund, known particularly for its record-setting growth under the management of Peter Lyn ...
before 2001, which it did in 2000. John McQuown and
David G. Booth David Gilbert Booth (born 1946) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is the executive chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, which he co-founded with Rex Sinquefield. Career Booth graduated from Lawrence High School in ...
of
Wells Fargo Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California; operational headquarters in Manhattan; and managerial offices throughout the United States and intern ...
, and
Rex Sinquefield Rex Andrew Sinquefield (; born September 7, 1944) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist who has been called an "index-fund pioneer" for creating the first passively managed index fund open to the general public Sinquefield wa ...
of the
American National Bank First American National Bank was a subsidiary of First American Corporation, a financial institution based in Nashville, Tennessee, that served the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia and Virginia. It was headquartered in the First American ...
in Chicago, established the first two Standard and Poor's Composite Index Funds in 1973. Both of these funds were established for institutional clients; individual investors were excluded. Wells Fargo started with $5 million from their own pension fund, while
Illinois Bell Illinois Bell Telephone Company, LLC is the Bell Operating Company serving Illinois. It is owned by AT&T through AT&T Teleholdings, formerly Ameritech. Their headquarters are at 225 West Randolph St., Chicago, IL. After the 1984 Bell System ...
put in $5 million of their pension funds at American National Bank. In 1971, Jeremy Grantham and Dean LeBaron at Batterymarch Financial Management "described the idea at a Harvard Business School seminar in 1971, but found no takers until 1973. Two years later, in December 1974, the firm finally attracted its first index client." In 1981, Booth and Sinquefield started
Dimensional Fund Advisors Dimensional Fund Advisors, L.P. (branded Dimensional abbreviated DFA) is a private investment firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. Dimensional was founded in Chicago in 1981 by David Booth, Rex Sinquefield and Larry Klotz. The company has affili ...
(DFA), and McQuown joined its board of directors. DFA further developed indexed-based investment strategies. Vanguard started its first bond index fund in 1986. Frederick L. A. Grauer at Wells Fargo harnessed McQuown and Booth's indexing theories, which led to Wells Fargo's pension funds managing over $69 billion in 1989 and over $565 billion in 1998. In 1996, Wells Fargo sold its indexing operation to Barclays Bank of London, which it operated under the name Barclays Global Investors (BGI). Blackrock, Inc. acquired BGI in 2009; the acquisition included BGI's index fund management (both its institutional funds and its iShares ETF business) and its active management.


Economic theory

Economist
Eugene Fama Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama (; born February 14, 1939) is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis. He is currently Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Servic ...
said, "I take the market efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information." A precondition for this strong version of the hypothesis is that information and trading costs, the costs of getting prices to reflect information, are always 0. A weaker and economically more sensible version of the efficiency hypothesis says that prices reflect information to the point where the marginal benefits of acting on information (the profits to be made) do not exceed marginal costs. Economists cite the
efficient-market hypothesis The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to "beat the market" consistently on a risk-adjusted bas ...
(EMH) as the fundamental premise that justifies the creation of the index funds. The hypothesis implies that
fund managers Investment management is the professional asset management of various securities, including shareholdings, bonds, and other assets, such as real estate, to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of investors. Investors may be institut ...
and stock analysts are constantly looking for securities that may out-perform the market; and that this competition is so effective that any new information about the fortune of a company will rapidly be incorporated into stock prices. It is postulated therefore that it is very difficult to tell ahead of time which stocks will out-perform the market.Burton G. Malkiel, ''A Random Walk Down Wall Street'', W. W. Norton, 1996, By creating an index fund that mirrors the whole market the inefficiencies of stock selection are avoided. In particular, the EMH says that economic profits cannot be wrung from stock picking. This is not to say that a stock picker cannot achieve a superior return, just that the excess return will on average not exceed the costs of winning it (including salaries, information costs, and trading costs). The conclusion is that most investors would be better off buying a cheap index fund. Note that return refers to the ex-ante expectation;
ex-post References Notes References Further reading

* * {{Latin phrases Lists of Latin phrases, E ...
realisation of payoffs may make some stock-pickers appear successful. In addition, there have been many criticisms of the EMH.


Tracking

Tracking can be achieved by trying to hold all of the
securities A security is a tradable financial asset. The term commonly refers to any form of financial instrument, but its legal definition varies by jurisdiction. In some countries and languages people commonly use the term "security" to refer to any for ...
in the index, in the same proportions as the index. Other methods include statistically sampling the market and holding "representative" securities. Many index funds rely on a computer model with little or no human input in the decision as to which securities are purchased or sold and are thus subject to a form of
passive management Passive management (also called passive investing) is an investing strategy that tracks a market-weighted index or portfolio. Passive management is most common on the equity market, where index funds track a stock market index, but it is becoming ...
.


Fees

The lack of active management generally gives the advantage of much lower fees compared to actively managed mutual funds and, in taxable accounts, lower taxes. In addition it is usually impossible to precisely mirror the index as the models for sampling and mirroring, by their nature, cannot be 100% accurate. The difference between the index performance and the fund performance is called the "
tracking error In finance, tracking error or active risk is a measure of the risk in an investment portfolio that is due to active management decisions made by the portfolio manager; it indicates how closely a portfolio follows the index to which it is benchmarked ...
", or, colloquially, "jitter." Index funds are available from many
investment managers Investment management is the professional asset management of various securities, including shareholdings, bonds, and other assets, such as real estate, to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of investors. Investors may be institut ...
. Some common indices include the
S&P 500 The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices. As of D ...
, the
Nikkei 225 The Nikkei 225, or , more commonly called the ''Nikkei'' or the ''Nikkei index'' (), is a stock market index for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). It has been calculated daily by the '' Nihon Keizai Shimbun'' (''The Nikkei'') newspaper since 1950 ...
, and the
FTSE 100 The Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index, also called the FTSE 100 Index, FTSE 100, FTSE, or, informally, the "Footsie" , is a share index of the 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange with (in principle) the highest market ...
. Less common indexes come from academics like
Eugene Fama Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama (; born February 14, 1939) is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis. He is currently Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Servic ...
and
Kenneth French Kenneth Ronald "Ken" French (born March 10, 1954) is the Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has previously been a faculty member at MIT, the Yale School of Management, and the Uni ...
, who created "research indexes" in order to develop asset pricing models, such as their Three Factor Model. The Fama–French three-factor model is used by
Dimensional Fund Advisors Dimensional Fund Advisors, L.P. (branded Dimensional abbreviated DFA) is a private investment firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. Dimensional was founded in Chicago in 1981 by David Booth, Rex Sinquefield and Larry Klotz. The company has affili ...
to design their index funds. Robert Arnott and Professor
Jeremy Siegel Jeremy James Siegel (born November 14, 1945) is the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Siegel comments extensively on the economy and financial markets. He ...
have also created new competing
fundamentally based indexes Fundamentally based indexes or fundamental indexes, also called fundamentally-weighted indexes, are indexes in which stocks are weighted according to factors related to their fundamentals such as earnings, dividends and assets, commonly used when p ...
based on such criteria as
dividend A dividend is a distribution of profits by a corporation to its shareholders. When a corporation earns a profit or surplus, it is able to pay a portion of the profit as a dividend to shareholders. Any amount not distributed is taken to be re-in ...
s,
earnings Earnings are the net benefits of a corporation's operation. Earnings is also the amount on which corporate tax is due. For an analysis of specific aspects of corporate operations several more specific terms are used as EBIT (earnings before intere ...
,
book value In accounting, book value is the value of an asset according to its balance sheet account balance. For assets, the value is based on the original cost of the asset less any depreciation, amortization or impairment costs made against the asset. T ...
, and
sales Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods sold in a given targeted time period. The delivery of a service for a cost is also considered a sale. The seller, or the provider of the goods or services, completes a sale in r ...
.


Indexing methods


Traditional indexing

Indexing is traditionally known as the practice of owning a representative collection of
securities A security is a tradable financial asset. The term commonly refers to any form of financial instrument, but its legal definition varies by jurisdiction. In some countries and languages people commonly use the term "security" to refer to any for ...
, in the same ratios as the target index. Modification of security holdings happens only periodically, when companies enter or leave the target index.


Synthetic indexing

Synthetic indexing is a modern technique of using a combination of equity index futures contracts and investments in low-risk bonds to replicate the performance of a similar overall investment in the equities making up the index. Although maintaining the future position has a slightly higher cost structure than traditional passive sampling, synthetic indexing can result in more favourable tax treatment, particularly for international investors who are subject to U.S. dividend withholding taxes. The bond portion can hold higher yielding instruments, with a trade-off of corresponding higher risk, a technique referred to as enhanced indexing.


Enhanced indexing

Enhanced indexing In finance, enhanced indexing is any indexing strategy employed with the intention of outperforming strict indexing. Enhanced indexing attempts to generate modest excess returns compared to traditional index funds and other passive management tech ...
is a catch-all term referring to improvements to index fund management that emphasize performance, possibly using active management. Enhanced index funds employ a variety of enhancement techniques, including customized indexes (instead of relying on commercial indexes), trading strategies, exclusion rules, and timing strategies. The cost advantage of indexing could be reduced or eliminated by employing active management. Enhanced indexing strategies help in offsetting the proportion of tracking error that would come from expenses and transaction costs. These enhancement strategies can be: * Lower cost, issue selection,
yield curve In finance, the yield curve is a graph which depicts how the yields on debt instruments - such as bonds - vary as a function of their years remaining to maturity. Typically, the graph's horizontal or x-axis is a time line of months or ye ...
positioning. * Sector and quality positioning and call exposure positioning.


Advantages


Low costs

Because the composition of a target index is a known quantity, relative to actively managed funds, it costs less to run an index fund. Typically expense ratios of an index fund range from 0.10% for U.S. Large Company Indexes to 0.70% for Emerging Market Indexes. The expense ratio of the average large cap actively managed mutual fund as of 2015 is 1.15%. If a mutual fund produces 10% return before expenses, taking account of the expense ratio difference would result in an after expense return of 9.9% for the large cap index fund versus 8.85% for the actively managed large cap fund.


Simplicity

The investment objectives of index funds are easy to understand. Once an investor knows the target index of an index fund, what securities the index fund will hold can be determined directly. Managing one's index fund holdings may be as easy as every six months or every year.


Lower turnovers

Turnover refers to the selling and buying of securities by the fund manager. Selling securities in some jurisdictions may result in
capital gains tax A capital gains tax (CGT) is the tax on profits realized on the sale of a non-inventory asset. The most common capital gains are realized from the sale of stocks, Bond (finance), bonds, precious metals, real estate, and property. Not all count ...
charges, which are sometimes passed on to fund investors. Even in the absence of taxes, turnover has both explicit and implicit costs, which directly reduce returns on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Because index funds are passive investments, the turnovers are lower than actively managed funds.


No style drift

Style drift Style drift occurs when a mutual fund's actual and declared investment style differs. A mutual fund’s declared investment style can be found in the fund prospectus which investors commonly rely upon to aid their investment decisions. For most inve ...
occurs when actively managed mutual funds go outside of their described style (i.e., mid-cap value, large cap income, etc.) to increase returns. Such drift hurts portfolios that are built with diversification as a high priority. Drifting into other styles could reduce the overall portfolio's diversity and subsequently increase risk. With an index fund, this drift is not possible and accurate diversification of a portfolio is increased.


Disadvantages


Losses to arbitrageurs

Index funds must periodically "rebalance" or adjust their portfolios to match the new prices and
market capitalization Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders. Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by t ...
of the underlying securities in the stock or other indexes that they track. This allows algorithmic traders (80% of the trades of whom involve the top 20% most popular securities) to perform
index arbitrage Index arbitrage is a subset of statistical arbitrage focusing on index components. An index (such as S&P 500) is made up of several components (in the case of the S&P 500, 500 large US stocks picked by S&P to represent the US market), and the va ...
by anticipating and trading ahead of stock price movements caused by mutual fund rebalancing, making a profit on foreknowledge of the large institutional block orders. This results in profits transferred from investors to algorithmic traders, estimated to be at least 21 to 28
basis point A basis point (often abbreviated as bp, often pronounced as "bip" or "beep") is one hundredth of 1 percentage point. The related term '' permyriad'' means one hundredth of 1 percent. Changes of interest rates are often stated in basis points. If ...
s annually for
S&P 500 The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices. As of D ...
index funds, and at least 38 to 77 basis points per year for
Russell 2000 The Russell 2000 Index is a small-cap stock market index that makes up the smallest 2,000 stocks in the Russell 3000 Index. It was started by the Frank Russell Company in 1984. The index is maintained by FTSE Russell, a subsidiary of the Lond ...
funds. In effect, an index, and consequently, all funds tracking an index are announcing ahead of time the trades that they are planning to make, allowing value to be siphoned by
arbitrage In economics and finance, arbitrage (, ) is the practice of taking advantage of a difference in prices in two or more markets; striking a combination of matching deals to capitalise on the difference, the profit being the difference between the ...
urs, in a legal practice known as "index front running". Algorithmic high-frequency traders all have advanced access to the index re-balancing information, and spend large sums on fast technology to compete against each other to be the first—often by a few microseconds—to make these arbitrages. John Montgomery of
Bridgeway Capital Management Bridgeway Capital Management Inc. ("Bridgeway") is a U.S. asset manager based in Houston, Texas offering statistically driven institutional investment strategies, mutual funds, and sub-advisory services. Bridgeway specializes in domestic equities, ...
says that the resulting "poor investor returns" from trading ahead of mutual funds is "the elephant in the room" that "shockingly, people are not talking about." Related "time zone arbitrage" against mutual funds and their underlying securities traded on overseas markets is likely "damaging to financial integration between the United States, Asia and Europe."


Common market impact

One problem occurs when a large amount of money tracks the ''same'' index. According to theory, a company should not be worth more when it is in an index. But due to supply and demand, a company being added can have a demand shock, and a company being deleted can have a supply shock, and this will change the price. This does not show up in tracking error since the index is also affected. A fund may experience less impact by tracking a less popular index.


Possible tracking error from index

Since index funds aim to match market returns, both under- and over-performance compared to the market is considered a "tracking error". For example, an inefficient index fund may generate a positive tracking error in a falling market by holding too much cash, which holds its value compared to the market. According to
The Vanguard Group The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, with about $7 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 13, 2021. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-la ...
, a well-run S&P 500 index fund should have a tracking error of 5
basis point A basis point (often abbreviated as bp, often pronounced as "bip" or "beep") is one hundredth of 1 percentage point. The related term '' permyriad'' means one hundredth of 1 percent. Changes of interest rates are often stated in basis points. If ...
s or less, but a Morningstar survey found an average of 38 basis points across all index funds.


Diversification

Diversification Diversification may refer to: Biology and agriculture * Genetic divergence, emergence of subpopulations that have accumulated independent genetic changes * Agricultural diversification involves the re-allocation of some of a farm's resources to ...
refers to the number of different securities in a fund. A fund with more securities is said to be better diversified than a fund with smaller number of securities. Owning many securities reduces volatility by decreasing the impact of large price swings above or below the average return in a single security. A
Wilshire 5000 The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index, or more simply the Wilshire 5000, is a market-capitalization-weighted index of the market value of all American-stocks actively traded in the United States. As of March 31, 2022, the index contained 3,660 c ...
index would be considered diversified, but a bio-tech ETF would not. Since some indices, such as the
S&P 500 The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices. As of D ...
and
FTSE 100 The Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index, also called the FTSE 100 Index, FTSE 100, FTSE, or, informally, the "Footsie" , is a share index of the 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange with (in principle) the highest market ...
, are dominated by large company stocks, an index fund may have a high percentage of the fund concentrated in a few large companies. This position represents a reduction of diversity and can lead to increased volatility and
investment risk Financial risk is any of various types of risk associated with financing, including financial transactions that include company loans in risk of default. Often it is understood to include only downside risk, meaning the potential for financial ...
for an investor who seeks a diversified fund. Some advocate adopting a strategy of investing in every security in the world in proportion to its market capitalization, generally by investing in a collection of ETFs in proportion to their home country market capitalization. A global indexing strategy may have lower variance in returns than one based only on home market indexes, because there may be less correlation between the returns of companies operating in different markets than between companies operating in the same market.


Asset allocation and achieving balance

Asset allocation Asset allocation is the implementation of an investment strategy that attempts to balance risk versus reward by adjusting the percentage of each asset in an investment portfolio according to the investor's risk tolerance, goals and investment tim ...
is the process of determining the mix of
stock In finance, stock (also capital stock) consists of all the shares by which ownership of a corporation or company is divided.Longman Business English Dictionary: "stock - ''especially AmE'' one of the shares into which ownership of a company ...
s, bonds and other classes of investable assets to match the investor's risk capacity, which includes attitude towards risk, net income, net worth, knowledge about investing concepts, and time horizon. Index funds capture asset classes in a low-cost and tax-efficient manner and are used to design balanced portfolios. A combination of various index mutual funds or ETFs could be used to implement a full range of investment policies from low to high risk.


Pension investment in index funds

Research conducted by the World Pensions Council (WPC) suggests that up to 15% of overall assets held by large pension funds and national
social security Welfare, or commonly social welfare, is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specificall ...
funds are invested in various forms of passive strategies including index funds, as opposed to the more traditional actively managed that still constitute the largest share of institutional investments The proportion invested in passive funds varies widely across jurisdictions and fund type. The relative appeal of index funds, ETFs and other index-replicating investment vehicles has grown rapidly for various reasons ranging from disappointment with underperforming actively managed mandates to the broader tendency towards cost reduction across public services and social benefits that followed the 2008-2012
Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At ...
. Public-sector pensions and national
reserve Reserve or reserves may refer to: Places * Reserve, Kansas, a US city * Reserve, Louisiana, a census-designated place in St. John the Baptist Parish * Reserve, Montana, a census-designated place in Sheridan County * Reserve, New Mexico, a US vi ...
funds have been among the early adopters of index funds and other passive management strategies.


Comparison of index funds with index ETFs

In the United States, mutual funds price their assets by their current value every business day, usually at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time, when the New York Stock Exchange closes for the day. Index ETFs, in contrast, are priced during normal trading hours, usually 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. Index ETFs are also sometimes weighted by revenue rather than market capitalization.


Tax considerations


International tax considerations

Typically mutual funds supply the correct tax reporting documents for only one country, which can cause tax problems for shareholders citizen to or resident of another country, either now or in the future.


Implications for US investors

US citizens/taxpayers living at home or abroad should particularly consider whether their investment in an ex-US fund (meaning the fund is administered by a foreign investment company) not providing annual 1099 forms (which report distributed income and capital gains/losses) or annual PFIC annual information statements will be subject to punitive US taxation under section 1291 of the US tax code. Note that if a PFIC annual information statement is provided, a careful filing of form 8621 is required to avoid punitive US taxation.


U.S. capital gains tax considerations

U.S. mutual funds are required by law to distribute realized capital gains to their shareholders. If a mutual fund sells a security for a gain, the capital gain is taxable for that year; similarly a realized capital loss can offset any other realized capital gains. Scenario: An investor entered a mutual fund during the middle of the year and experienced an overall loss for the next six months. The mutual fund itself sold securities for a gain for the year, therefore must declare a capital gains distribution. The
IRS The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of the federal statutory tax ...
would require the investor to pay tax on the capital gains distribution, regardless of the overall loss. A small investor selling an ETF to another investor does not cause a redemption on ETF itself; therefore, ETFs are more immune to the effect of forced redemption causing realized capital gains.


See also

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Exchange-traded fund An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund and exchange-traded product, i.e. they are traded on stock exchanges. ETFs are similar in many ways to mutual funds, except that ETFs are bought and sold from other owners throughout the ...
*
Passive management Passive management (also called passive investing) is an investing strategy that tracks a market-weighted index or portfolio. Passive management is most common on the equity market, where index funds track a stock market index, but it is becoming ...
*
Stock market index In finance, a stock index, or stock market index, is an index that measures a stock market, or a subset of the stock market, that helps investors compare current stock price levels with past prices to calculate market performance. Two of the ...
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Enhanced indexing In finance, enhanced indexing is any indexing strategy employed with the intention of outperforming strict indexing. Enhanced indexing attempts to generate modest excess returns compared to traditional index funds and other passive management tech ...


References

* John Bogle, ''Bogle on Mutual Funds: New Perspectives for the Intelligent Investor'', Dell, 1994, * Mark T. Hebner, Foreword by
Harry Markowitz Harry Max Markowitz (born August 24, 1927) is an American economist who received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize and the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Markowitz is a professor of finance at the Rady School of Management ...

Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors
IFA Publishing; Updated and Revised, 2015, * Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, Michael LeBoeuf, ''The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing'', Wiley, 2006, * From
Berkshire Hathaway Berkshire Hathaway Inc. () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Its main business and source of capital is insurance, from ...
2004 Annual Report; see Wikiquotes for text.


External links


Is Stock Picking Declining Around the World?
The article argues that there is a move towards indexing.
The Lowdown on Index Funds
Investopedia's introduction to Index Funds
False Discoveries in Mutual Fund Performance: Measuring Luck in Estimated Alphas
Evidence that stock selection is not a viable investing strategy.

- ..."the number of funds that have beaten the market over their entire histories is so small that the False Discovery Rate test can’t eliminate the possibility that the few that did were merely false positives" — just lucky, in other words. {{DEFAULTSORT:Index Fund Investment funds