Index Fund Advisors (IFA) is a

registered investment advisor A registered investment adviser (RIA) is a firm that is an investment adviser in the United States, registered as such with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or a state's securities agency. The numerous references to RIAs within the Inves ...

(RIA) headquartered in

Irvine, California Irvine () is a Planned community, master-planned city in South Orange County, California, United States, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Irvine Company started developing the area in the 1960s and the city was formally incorporated on ...

, with representatives in several locations across the United States. The company was founded on March 5, 1999 by Mark T. Hebner, former president of nuclear pharmacy company Syncor International, with the goal of providing online automated investment adviser services, with a personal touch as needed, while also providing educational material regarding investing to the general public through the websit
IFA.com
IFA offers

high-net-worth individual High-net-worth individual (HNWI) is a term used by some segments of the financial services industry to designate persons whose investible wealth (assets such as stocks and bonds) exceeds a given amount. Typically, these individuals are defined ...

s, 401k plans, 403b plans, foundations, and endowments of an expanding range of advisory services that are consistent with IFA's investment strategy 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 ...

. Heavily influenced by the works of Nobel Laureates

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 Servi ...

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 ...

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 ...

William F. Sharpe William Forsyth Sharpe (born June 16, 1934) is an American economist. He is the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. ...

Merton Miller Merton Howard Miller (May 16, 1923 – June 3, 2000) was an American economist, and the co-author of the Modigliani–Miller theorem (1958), which proposed the irrelevance of debt-equity structure. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic ...

Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (; he, דניאל כהנמן; born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was award ...

and

Friedrich von Hayek Friedrich August von Hayek ( , ; 8 May 189923 March 1992), often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian–British economist, legal theorist and philosopher who is best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Hayek ...

, IFA advises clients to invest in low-cost index mutual funds, such as those provided 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 affilia ...

Vanguard The vanguard (also called the advance guard) is the leading part of an advancing military formation. It has a number of functions, including seeking out the enemy and securing ground in advance of the main force. History The vanguard derives fr ...

or Blackrock's iShares. Additionally, IFA offers advice on faith-based and sustainable investments, through its IFAsustainable.com and InvestingforCatholics.com sites. IFA pioneered the idea of the

Robo-Advisor Robo-advisors or robo-advisers are a class of financial adviser that provide financial advice and investment management online with moderate to minimal human intervention. They provide digital financial advice based on mathematical rules or algorith ...

when it first published their website on November 9, 1999 as indexfundsadvisors.com, then IFA.tv and finally as IFA.com. Mark Hebner pioneered the business model of a low-cost online Registered Investment Adviser which would provide an online algorithm-based risk capacity survey designed to match individual investors with one of several index portfolios. These portfolios have always been implemented exclusively with index funds. The process of becoming an IFA client has not required face to face meetings and there has been minimal human intervention. IFA was among the first RIAs to offer an online live advisor camera (streaming video and NetMeeting) and live chat. Since 1999, IFA clients have been offered portfolio rebalancing, tax loss harvesting, tax-management, asset location, extensive online education and historical index and index portfolio risk and return data. In 2012, IFA built its own in-house TV studio and produces videos that are published on

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

Roku Roku ( ) is a brand of hardware digital media players manufactured by American company Roku, Inc. They offer access to streaming media content from online services. The first Roku model, developed in collaboration with Netflix, was introduce ...

, and IFA.tv (352 videos as of August 2016). One of the world's largest private collections of financial books can be found at IFA, with about 2,494 books dating back to 1648. The books are catalogued and displayed on IFA.com. Mark Hebner is also the author of ''Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors'', a book on

behavioral finance Behavioral economics studies the effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the decisions of individuals or institutions, such as how those decisions vary from those implied by classical economic theory. ...

, the failure of

active management Active management (also called ''active investing'') is an approach to investing. In an actively managed portfolio of investments, the investor selects the investments that make up the portfolio. Active management is often compared to passive man ...

and the advantages of

passive investing 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 m ...

. The book was first published in 2005 and its latest update was published in 2015. Together these various media endeavors advance Hebner's mission to get investors all over the world to stop actively investing their investment portfolios. IFA's investing philosophy is based on Nobel prize-winning academic and empirical research, including 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 ...

, multi-factor asset pricing models, such as the Fama-French Three-Factor Model and more generally

modern portfolio theory Modern portfolio theory (MPT), or mean-variance analysis, is a mathematical framework for assembling a portfolio of assets such that the expected return is maximized for a given level of risk. It is a formalization and extension of diversificatio ...

. IFA rejects the investment strategies generally known as

. These strategies include stock picking, market timing, manager selection and tactical asset allocation. IFA reached $3.84 billion in assets under management on 12/31/2017. According to Forbes, IFA was one of the 100 fastest growing RIA Firms, in 2016.{{Cite news, url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecooling/2016/11/14/top-100-ria-firms-by-ten-year-growth/#76b41a296b1f, title=100 Fastest Growing RIA Firms Over Ten Years, last=Cooling, first=Julie, work=Forbes, access-date=2017-10-04, language=en

References

External links

Official WebsiteIndex Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors
1999 establishments in California Companies based in Irvine, California Financial services companies established in 1999 Financial advisors Investment management companies of the United States

See also

References

External links