How To Buy Stock Index Funds

These fund managers then mimic the index, creating a fund that looks as much as possible like the index, without actively managing the fund. Over time the index changes, as companies are added and removed, and the fund manager mechanically replicates those changes in the fund.

how to buy stock index funds

Some of the most watched indexes fill up the financial news every night and are often used as shorthand for the performance of the market, with investors tracking them to get a read on how stocks as a whole are faring.

While some funds such as S&P 500 or Nasdaq-100 index funds allow you to own companies across industries, other funds own only a specific industry, country or even investing style (say, dividend stocks).

The list below includes index funds from a variety of companies tracking a broadly diversified index, and it includes some of the lowest-cost funds you can buy and sell on the public markets. When it comes to index funds like these, one of the most important factors in your total return is cost. Included are three mutual funds and seven ETFs:

The Nasdaq-100 Index is another stock market index, but is not as diversified as the S&P 500 because of its large weighting in technology shares. These two funds track the largest non-financial companies in the index.

While the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are two of the most popular stock market indexes, there are many others that track different parts of the investment universe. These three index funds are also worth considering for your portfolio.

Overview: Vanguard also offers a fund that covers effectively the entire universe of publicly traded stocks in the U.S., known as the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF. It consists of small, medium and large companies across all sectors.

Your first step is finding what you want to invest in. While an S&P 500 index fund is the most popular index fund, they also exist for different industries, countries and even investment styles. So you need to consider what exactly you want to invest in and why it might hold opportunity:

ETFs have become more popular recently because they help investors avoid some of the higher fees associated with mutual funds. ETFs are also becoming popular because they offer other key advantages over mutual funds.

Index funds tend to be much cheaper than average funds. Compare the numbers above with the average stock mutual fund (on an asset-weighted basis), which charged 0.47 percent, or the average stock ETF, which charged 0.16 percent. While the ETF expense ratio is the same in each case, the cost for mutual funds generally is higher. Many mutual funds are not index funds, and they charge higher fees to pay the higher expenses of their investment management teams.

An index fund is typically created around a specific theme. For example, there are indexes for companies based on their geographic location (such as the U.S.), their size (large companies, as in the S&P 500), their sector (such as semiconductors or healthcare), or whether they pay dividends. An index might also consist of only bonds, or only bonds of a certain quality and duration.

In contrast, the Dow Jones Industrials contains just 30 companies, while the Nasdaq 100 contains about 100 companies. While the holdings of these indexes do overlap, the S&P 500 contains the widest variety of companies across industries and is the most broadly diversified of those three indexes.

Index funds may be structured as exchange-traded funds (index ETFs). These products are essentially portfolios of stocks that are managed by a professional financial firm, in which each share represents a small ownership stake in the entire portfolio. For index funds, the goal of the financial firm is not to outperform the underlying index but simply to match its performance. If, for example, a particular stock makes up 1% of the index, then the firm managing the index fund will seek to mimic that same composition by making 1% of its portfolio consist of that stock.

Index funds track portfolios composed of many stocks. As a result, investors benefit from the positive effects of diversification, such as increasing the expected return of the portfolio while minimizing the overall risk. While any individual stock may see its price drop steeply, if it is just a relatively small component of a larger index, it would not be as damaging.

Most experts agree that index funds are very good investments for long-term investors. They are low-cost options for obtaining a well-diversified portfolio that passively tracks an index. Be sure to compare different index funds or ETFs to be sure you are tracking the best index for your goals and at the lowest cost.

We're not distracted by the demands of private owners or other outside interests. So as more investors choose our index funds and new economies of scale help us lower costs, those benefits are passed directly to you.

Cumulative figure for all share classes from the 2013 calendar year through the 2019 calendar year for Vanguard's U.S.-domiciled index mutual funds and ETFs. Estimated savings is the difference between prior and current expense ratios multiplied by average assets under management (AUM). Average AUM is based on month-end assets, which are then averaged over the 12 months of the calendar year. Ending assets are as of December 31, 2019.

Each index fund contains a preselected collection of hundreds or thousands of stocks, bonds, or sometimes both. If a single stock or bond in the collection is performing poorly, there's a good chance that another is performing well, which helps minimize your losses.

Index funds don't change their stock or bond holdings as often as actively managed funds. This often results in fewer taxable capital gains distributions from the fund, which could reduce your tax bill.

2 Vanguard average expense ratio: 0.06%. Industry average expense ratio: 0.20%. All averages are for index mutual funds and ETFs and are asset-weighted. Industry average excludes Vanguard. Sources: Vanguard and Morningstar, Inc., as of December 31, 2021.

All investing is subject to risk, including the possible loss of the money you invest. Diversification does not ensure a profit or protect against a loss. There is no guarantee that any particular asset allocation or mix of funds will meet your investment objectives or provide you with a given level of income.

Bond funds are subject to the risk that an issuer will fail to make payments on time and that bond prices will decline because of rising interest rates or negative perceptions of an issuer's ability to make payments. Investments in stocks or bonds issued by non-U.S. companies are subject to risks including country/regional risk and currency risk. Funds that concentrate on a relatively narrow market sector face the risk of higher share-price volatility.

Investments in Target Retirement Funds are subject to the risks of their underlying funds. The year in the fund name refers to the approximate year (the target date) when an investor in the fund would retire and leave the workforce. The fund will gradually shift its emphasis from more aggressive investments to more conservative ones based on its target date. An investment in a Target Retirement Fund is not guaranteed at any time, including on or after its target date.

I don't write about it very often, but regular readers know the vast majority of my portfolio is invested in traditional low-cost, broadly-diversified index mutual funds and their exchange traded fund (ETF) equivalents. I'm talking about funds like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (25% of my retirement portfolio and 100% of my HSA portfolio) and the Vanguard Total International Stock Market Index Fund (15% of my retirement portfolio and 50% of my 529 portfolio.) Now I have small portions of my portfolio dedicated to things like bonds, small value stocks, and real estate, but you won't see any individual stock picking, market timing, or significant use of active management of publicly traded securities.

Recently I was looking for an old post about index funds to link to and realized I didn't have one. So this is one of those back to basic posts. If you already know index funds rule, feel free to move on to something else on the site. If you haven't, this post is for you.

This is the main reason I use index funds as the major building blocks in my portfolio and the main thing I look at for those minor portions of the portfolio where I consider doing something different from indexing. The empirical data is quite clear on this. Buying individual stocks (or bonds) introduces uncompensated risk, i.e. a risk that you are not compensated adequately for taking. This is the risk of a company going bankrupt or a borrower defaulting or being downgraded. This is when an individual security goes down in value when the overall market is going up and it happens all the time to people who buy individual securities. It doesn't happen to me though, because I invest in mutual funds. Mutual funds give you broad diversification, pooled costs, daily liquidity, and professional management all for a very low cost.

You can get those particular benefits with an actively managed mutual fund just as well as an index fund. However, the data on active management vs passive management is clear too. Time and time again it has been shown that active management doesn't work well enough to overcome its additional costs, particularly over the long term and even more so in a taxable account. At 10 years, an index fund is outperforming 80%+ of its peers. By the time you get out to your 30-60 year investing horizon and consider all of the asset classes in your portfolio, an index fund portfolio is going to outperform 99% of similar actively managed portfolios.

Another important reason I invest in index funds is that it takes dramatically less time to invest in this manner. While I have to spend additional time on my own portfolio to direct significant ongoing contributions, I manage my parents' all-index-fund portfolio in about an hour a year. Seriously. An hour. That's it. What do we do in that hour? We rebalance it and pull out their required minimum distribution. And even the initial set-up didn't take much longer than that. 041b061a72