Quotes About Index funds

Two-thirds of professionally managed funds are regularly outperformed by a broad capitalization-weighted index fund with equivalent risk, and those that do appear to produce excess returns in one period are not likely to do so in the next. The record of professionals does not suggest that sufficient predictability exists in the stock market to produce exploitable arbitrage opportunities.

Since most investment managers will not beat the market, investors should at least consider investing in "index funds" that replicate the market and so never get beaten by the market. Indexing may not be fun or exciting, but it works. The data from the performance measurement firms show that index funds have outperformed most investment managers over long periods of time. For

The overwhelmingly large number of investors should seek membership in the passive management club. This group, instead of scratching for a small edge in today's extraordinarily efficient markets, wisely accepts what the markets deliver. Charley makes a compelling case for the market-matching strategy of investing in index funds, touting their simplicity, transparency, low cost, tax efficiency, and superior returns. Winning

We can't stress enough how important it is to establish your own personal financial plan, and then carefully follow that plan. Select low-cost mutual funds, preferably index funds, as the core of your investment portfolio.

Index funds outperform approximately 80 percent of all actively managed funds over long periods of time. They do so for one simple reason: rock-bottom costs. In a random market, we don't know what future returns will be. However, we do know that an investor who keeps his or her costs low will earn a higher return than one who does not. That's the indexer's edge.

Paul Farrell, columnist for CBS Marketwatch and author of The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing: "So much attention is paid to which funds are at the head of the pack today that most people lose sight of the fact that, over longer time periods, index funds beat the vast majority of their actively managed peers.

Invest most or all of your money in index funds. Keep your costs of investing and taxes low.

Index funds generally buy and hold all the securities within a particular index in a market cap—weighted fashion. Thus while an S&P 500 Index fund would own all five hundred stocks that comprise the index, it would not own an equal amount of each of the five hundred stocks. The largest holding might, for example, be 5 percent of the entire portfolio. There

After adjusting the comparison of index funds to actively managed funds for survivorship bias, taxes, and loads, the dominance of index funds reaches insurmountable proportions. Once

And if you don't believe me or even Charley, remember that Warren Buffett, perhaps the greatest investor of our time, has opined that all investors would be better off if their portfolio contained a diversified group of index funds.

In investing, you get what you don't pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won't be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.

Within the realm of active equity management, investors inhabit a perverse world where higher fees correspond to lower returns. In the broader universe that includes active and passive management, index funds exhibit a dramatic cost advantage over their actively managed counterparts. Well-informed investors recognize that fund fees matter.

It seems to me - particularly for these retirement-plan investors, the vast majority of whom are not particularly financially sophisticated - by far the best way is to invest in index funds.

I am a huge, huge, huge fan of index funds. They are the investor's best friend and Wall Street's worst nightmare.

In the mutual fund industry, for example, the annual rate of portfolio turnover for the average actively managed equity fund runs to almost 100 percent, ranging from a hardly minimal 25 percent for the lowest turnover quintile to an astonishing 230 percent for the highest quintile. (The turnover of all-stock-market index funds is about 7 percent.)