Stock Indexes Quotes

Investors who focus on currencies, bonds, and stock markets generally assume a normal distribution of price changes: values jiggle up and down, but extreme moves are unusual. Of course, extreme moves are possible, as financial crashes show. But between 1985 and 2015, the S&P 500 stock index budged less than 3 percent from its starting point on 7,663 out of 7,817 days; in other words, for fully 98 percent of the time, the market is remarkably stable.

The average lifetime of a company on the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has declined from sixty years to a mere ten years

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.

Here is the crux of the strategy: Instead of hiring an expert, or spending a lot of time trying to decide which stocks or actively managed funds are likely to be top performers, just invest in index funds and forget about it!

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.)

Forty percent of all Russell 3000 stock components lost at least 70% of their value and never recovered over this period. Effectively all of the index’s overall returns came from 7% of component companies that outperformed by at least two standard deviations.

There is no question that the losing IPOs far outnumber the winners. Of the 8,606 firms examined, the returns on 6,796 of these firms, or 79 percent, have subsequently underperformed the returns on a representative small stock index, and almost half the firms have underper-formed by more than 10 percent per year.

the split-strike conversion strategy. Option traders often referred to it as a “collar” or “bull spread.” Basically, it involved buying a basket of stocks, in Madoff’s case 30 to 35 blue-chip stocks that correlated very closely to the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 100-stock index, and then protecting the stocks with put options. By bracketing an investment with puts and calls, you limit your potential profit if the market rises sharply; but in return you’ve protected yourself against devastating losses should the market drop. The calls created a ceiling on his gains when the market went up; the puts provided a floor to cut his losses when the market went down.

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time?   Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 percent into just three different mutual funds:   A U.S. total stock market index fund An international total stock market index fund A U.S. total bond market index fund.   Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you’ll adjust their amounts so that they’re again equal. (That’s the fifteen minutes per year, assuming you’ve enrolled in an automatic savings plan.)   That’s it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you’ll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably.

35% Vanguard U.S. Bond Index (Symbol VBMFX) 35% Vanguard Total U.S. Stock Market Index (Symbol VTSMX) 30% Vanguard Total International Stock Market Index (Symbol VGTSX)

The simplest approach to diversifying your stock market investments is to invest in one index fund that represents the entire stock market.

Becoming a successful investor in future should be effortless when you understand and let the market do the work for you." - Adam Messina

The winning formula for success in investing is owning the entire stock market through an index fund, and then doing nothing. Just stay the course.

stock market as measured by the Dow did decrease 25% between 1969 and 1971

The best way to own common stocks is through an index fund.3

Also, if one of the indexes is down for the day on volume larger than the prior day’s volume, it should decline more than 0.2% for this to be counted as a distribution day. After

The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.

Stocks are the things to own over time. Productivity will increase and stocks will increase with it. There are only a few things you can do wrong. One is to buy or sell at the wrong time. Paying high fees is the other way to get killed. The best way to avoid both of these is to buy a low-cost index fund, and buy it over time. Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy, but don’t think you can outsmart the market. “If a cross-section of American industry is going to do well over time, then why try to pick the little beauties and think you can do better? Very few people should be active investors.

they pale by comparison to the trading volumes of hedge funds, to say nothing of the levels of trading in exotic securities such as interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives such as futures on commodities, stock indexes, stocks, and even bets on whether a given company will go into bankruptcy (credit default swaps). The aggregate nominal value of these instruments, as I noted in Chapter 1, now exceeds $700 trillion.

With real assets, everything is different. The price of real estate, like the price of shares of stock or parts of a company or investments in a mutual fund, generally rises at least as rapidly as the consumer price index.

Robert Shiller, a finance professor at Yale University, says Graham inspired his valuation approach: Shiller compares the current price of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index against average corporate profits over the past 10 years (after inflation). By scanning the historical record, Shiller has shown that when his ratio goes well above 20, the market usually delivers poor returns afterward; when it drops well below 10, stocks typically produce handsome gains down the road.

For a number of years, professors at Duke University conducted a survey in which the chief financial officers of large corporations estimated the returns of the Standard & Poor’s index over the following year. The Duke scholars collected 11,600 such forecasts and examined their accuracy. The conclusion was straightforward: financial officers of large corporations had no clue about the short-term future of the stock market; the correlation between their estimates and the true value was slightly less than zero!

If you buy an S&P 500 index fund, your investment is highly diversified and its performance will match that of 500 leading U.S. corporations' stocks. Is it possible to lose all of your money? Yes, but the odds of that happening are slim and none. If 500 leading U.S. corporations all have their stock prices plummet to zero, the value of your investment portfolio will be the least of your problems. An economic collapse of that magnitude would make the Great Depression look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

By buying a share in a “total market” index fund, you acquire an ownership share in all the major businesses in the economy. Index funds eliminate the anxiety and expense of trying to predict which individual stocks, bonds, or mutual funds will beat the market.

The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.” Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this. “That’s a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn’t it?

For example, trading in S&P 500-linked futures totaled more than $60 trillion(!) in 2011, five times the S&P 500 Index total market capitalization of $12.5 trillion. We also have credit default swaps, which are essentially bets on whether a corporation can meet the interest payments on its bonds. These credit default swaps alone had a notional value of $33 trillion. Add to this total a slew of other derivatives, whose notional value as 2012 began totaled a cool $708 trillion. By contrast, for what it’s worth, the aggregate capitalization of the world’s stock and bond markets is about $150 trillion, less than one-fourth as much. Is this a great financial system . . . or what!

So tell me, Ray, what are the percentages you would put in stocks? What percentage in gold? and so on."... "First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket)... "Then you need long-term government bonds. Fifteen percent in intermediate term [seven- to ten-year Treasuries] and forty percent in long-term bonds [20- to 25-year Treasuries]."... He rounded out the portfolio with 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities... Lastly, the portfolio must be rebalanced. Meaning, when one segment does well, you must sell a portion and reallocate back to the original allocation. This should be done at least annually, and, if done properly, can actually increase tax efficiency. p390

Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and investor of legendary repute: "Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find that the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results (after fees and expenses) delivered by the great majority of investment professionals.

Novice forecasters often ask why not just say 0.5, coin toss, whenever they “know nothing” about a problem. There are several reasons why not. One is the risk of being ensnared in self-contradictions. Imagine you are asked whether the Nikkei stock index will close above 20,000 by June 30, 2015. Knowing nothing, you say 0.5 chance. Now suppose you are asked whether it will close above 22,000—and you again say 0.5—or between 20,000 and 22,000, and you again say 0.5. The more possibilities the questioner unpacks, the more obvious it becomes that the casual user of 0.5 is assigning incoherent probabilities that far exceed 1.0. See Amos Tversky and Derek Koehler, “Support Theory: A Nonextensional Representation of Subjective Probability,” Psychological Review

The risk you are likely to be rewarded for taking is the risk of owning all stocks. In effect, rather than betting on one roll of the dice, one spin at the roulette wheel, or a single hand at the blackjack table, you can own the whole casino. You can do this effortlessly, cheaply, and reliably by buying a total stock-market index fund, a low-cost portfolio of all the stocks worth owning.

It will also tell you how easy it is to do just that: simply buy the entire stock market. Then, once you have bought your stocks, get out of the casino and stay out. Just hold the market portfolio forever. And that’s what the index fund does. This investment philosophy is not only simple and elegant. The arithmetic on which it is based is irrefutable. But it is not easy to follow its discipline. So

An American home has not, historically speaking, been a lucrative investment. In fact, according to an index developed by Robert Shiller and his colleague Karl Case, the market price of an American home has barely increased at all over the long run. After adjusting for inflation, a $10,000 investment made in a home in 1896 would be worth just $10,600 in 1996. The rate of return had been less in a century than the stock market typically produces in a single year.

The most-studied evidence, by the greatest number of economists, concerns what is called short-term dependence. This refers to the way price levels or price changes at one moment can influence those shortly afterwards-an hour, a day, or a few years, depending on what you consider "short." A "momentum" effect is at work, some economists theorize: Once a stock price starts climbing, the odds are slightly in favor of it continuing to climb for a while longer. For instance, in 1991 Campbell Harvey of Duke- he of the CFO study mentioned earlier-studied stock exchanges in sixteen of the world's largest economies. He found that if an index fell in one month, it had slightly greater odds of falling again in the next moth, or, if it had risen, greater odds of continuing to rise. Indeed, the data show, the sharper the move in the first, the more likely is is that the price trend will continue into the next month, although at a slower rate. Several other studies have found similar short-term trending in stock prices. When major news about a company hits the wires, the stock will react promptly-but it may keep on moving for the next few days as the news spreads, analysts study it, and more investors start to act upon it.

In 1966, the Roman Catholic Church formally ended the largest censorship drive in the history of the world, formally known as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Index of Forbidden Books). Formally launched in 1559 under Pope Paul IV, this four-century project was remarkably successful, even against non-Catholics. The Church was so powerful in Europe and America that many authors would avoid controversial topics, or modify their works according to the Church's dictates, in order to avoid condemnation by the Church. Authors who ignored the Church's dictates and were banned had trouble finding publishers. Even if they were published, their books were often hard or impossible to find because bookstores were under pressure not to stock them.

Even if index numbers cannot fulfill the demands that theory has to make, they can still, in spite of their fundamental shortcomings and the inexactness of the methods by which they are actually determined, perform useful workaday services for the politician. If we have no other aim in view than the comparison of points of time that lie close to one another, then the errors that are involved in every method of calculating numbers may be so far ignored as to allow us to draw certain rough conclusions from them. Thus, for example, it becomes possible to a certain extent to span the temporal gap that lies, in a period of variation in the value of money, between movements of Stock Exchange rates and movements of the purchasing power that is expressed in the prices of commodities.

If you listen to financial TV, or read most market columnists, you’d think that investing is some kind of sport, or a war, or a struggle for survival in a hostile wilderness. But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game. The challenge for the intelligent investor is not to find the stocks that will go up the most and down the least, but rather to prevent yourself from being your own worst enemy—from buying high just because Mr. Market says “Buy!” and from selling low just because Mr. Market says “Sell!” If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash

The first concerns how an investor should choose among different types of broad-based index funds. The best-known of the broad stock market mutual funds and ETFs in the United States track the S&P 500 index of the largest stocks. We prefer using a broader index that includes more smaller-company stocks, such as the Russell 3000 index or the Dow-Wilshire 5000 index. Funds that track these broader indexes are often referred to as “total stock market” index funds. More than 80 years of stock market history confirm that portfolios of smaller stocks have produced a higher rate of return than the return of the S&P 500 large-company index. While smaller companies are undoubtedly less stable and riskier than large firms, they are likely—on average—to produce somewhat higher future returns. Total stock market index funds are the better way for investors to benefit from the long-run growth of economic activity.

In an ideal world, the intelligent investor would hold stocks only when they are cheap and sell them when they become overpriced, then duck into the bunker of bonds and cash until stocks again become cheap enough to buy. From 1966 through late 2001, one study claimed, $1 held continuously in stocks would have grown to $11.71. But if you had gotten out of stocks right before the five worst days of each year, your original $1 would have grown to $987.12.1 Like most magical market ideas, this one is based on sleight of hand. How, exactly, would you (or anyone) figure out which days will be the worst days—before they arrive? On January 7, 1973, the New York Times featured an interview with one of the nation’s top financial forecasters, who urged investors to buy stocks without hesitation: “It’s very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can now.” That forecaster was named Alan Greenspan, and it’s very rare that anyone has ever been so unqualifiedly wrong as the future Federal Reserve chairman was that day: 1973 and 1974 turned out to be the worst years for economic growth and the stock market since the Great Depression.2 Can professionals time the market any better than Alan Green-span? “I see no reason not to think the majority of the decline is behind us,” declared Kate Leary Lee, president of the market-timing firm of R. M. Leary & Co., on December 3, 2001. “This is when you want to be in the market,” she added, predicting that stocks “look good” for the first quarter of 2002.3 Over the next three months, stocks earned a measly 0.28% return, underperforming cash by 1.5 percentage points. Leary is not alone. A study by two finance professors at Duke University found that if you had followed the recommendations of the best 10% of all market-timing newsletters, you would have earned a 12.6% annualized return from 1991 through 1995. But if you had ignored them and kept your money in a stock index fund, you would have earned 16.4%.

Here are some of the handicaps mutual-fund managers and other professional investors are saddled with: With billions of dollars under management, they must gravitate toward the biggest stocks—the only ones they can buy in the multimillion-dollar quantities they need to fill their portfolios. Thus many funds end up owning the same few overpriced giants. Investors tend to pour more money into funds as the market rises. The managers use that new cash to buy more of the stocks they already own, driving prices to even more dangerous heights. If fund investors ask for their money back when the market drops, the managers may need to sell stocks to cash them out. Just as the funds are forced to buy stocks at inflated prices in a rising market, they become forced sellers as stocks get cheap again. Many portfolio managers get bonuses for beating the market, so they obsessively measure their returns against benchmarks like the S & P 500 index. If a company gets added to an index, hundreds of funds compulsively buy it. (If they don’t, and that stock then does well, the managers look foolish; on the other hand, if they buy it and it does poorly, no one will blame them.) Increasingly, fund managers are expected to specialize. Just as in medicine the general practitioner has given way to the pediatric allergist and the geriatric otolaryngologist, fund managers must buy only “small growth” stocks, or only “mid-sized value” stocks, or nothing but “large blend” stocks.6 If a company gets too big, or too small, or too cheap, or an itty bit too expensive, the fund has to sell it—even if the manager loves the stock. So

WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?

The ideal way to dollar-cost average is into a portfolio of index funds, which own every stock or bond worth having. That way, you renounce not only the guessing game of where the market is going but which sectors of the market—and which particular stocks or bonds within them—will do the best. Let’s say you can spare $500 a month. By owning and dollar-cost averaging into just three index funds—$300 into one that holds the total U.S. stock market, $100 into one that holds foreign stocks, and $100 into one that holds U.S. bonds—you can ensure that you own almost every investment on the planet that’s worth owning.7 Every month, like clockwork, you buy more. If the market has dropped, your preset amount goes further, buying you more shares than the month before. If the market has gone up, then your money buys you fewer shares. By putting your portfolio on permanent autopilot this way, you prevent yourself from either flinging money at the market just when it is seems most alluring (and is actually most dangerous) or refusing to buy more after a market crash has made investments truly cheaper (but seemingly more “risky”).

First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket). Initially that sounded low to me, but remember, stocks are three times more risky than bonds. And who am I to second-guess the Yoda of asset allocation!? “Then you need long-term government bonds. Fifteen percent in intermediate term [seven- to ten-year Treasuries] and forty percent in long-term bonds [20- to 25-year Treasuries].” “Why such a large percentage?” I asked. “Because this counters the volatility of the stocks.” I remembered quickly it’s about balancing risk, not the dollar amounts. And by going out to longer-term (duration) bonds, this allocation will bring a potential for higher returns. He rounded out the portfolio with 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities. “You need to have a piece of that portfolio that will do well with accelerated inflation, so you would want a percentage in gold and commodities. These have high volatility. Because there are environments where rapid inflation can hurt both stocks and bonds.” Lastly, the portfolio must be rebalanced. Meaning, when one segment does well, you must sell a portion and reallocate back to the original allocation. This should be done at least annually, and, if done properly, it can actually increase the tax efficiency. This is part of the reason why I recommend having a fiduciary implement and manage this crucial, ongoing process.

The U.S. government’s Thrift Savings Plan, developed for the country’s civilian and military employees, serves as a possible model. At the end of 2003, the plan contained $128.8 billion in assets distributed across five funds. Four of the funds track well-known indices, namely the large-capitalization-stock S&P 500 Index, the small-capitalization-stock Wilshire 4500 Index, the developed-foreign-stock MSCI EAFE Index and the broadly inclusive domestic bond Lehman Brothers U.S. Aggregate Index. From a security selection perspective, the U.S. government protects its employees from playing the negative-sum game of active management.

When playing a bear market, the same rules hold: You want to diversify your risks, especially knowing that collapses move even faster than rallies. You need to decide how much safe cash or near cash you want to hold to sleep at night and to handle financial emergencies, like the loss of your job or your house. Then decide how much to put into longer-term high-quality bonds, like those 30-year Treasuries and AAA corporates, but I think it’s still premature to make this move at the time of this writing, in August 2017. Then decide how much you want to put into a dollar bull fund or the ETF UUP, which tracks the U.S. dollar versus its six major trading partners. If you’re willing to risk part of your wealth, you can also bet on financial assets going down—from stocks to gold. Stocks are the one type of financial asset that goes down in either a deflationary crisis, like the 1930s, or an inflationary one, like the 1970s. So shorting stocks is the best way to prosper in the downturn, either way. But don’t leverage this bet. The markets are simply too volatile. You can short the stock market with no leverage by simply buying an ETF (exchange-traded fund) like the ProShares Short S&P 500 (NYSEArca: SH). It’s an inverse fund on the S&P 500, so if the index goes down 50 percent, you make 50 percent. The ProShares Ultrashort (NYSEArca: QID) is double short the NASDAQ 100, which is likely to get hit the worst. If you make this play, just do a half share, to avoid that two-times leverage (hold the other half in cash or short-term bonds). Direxion Daily Small Cap Bear 3X ETF (NYSEArca: TZA) is triple short the Russell 2000, which is also likely to lead on the way down. So buy only a one-third share of this one, to remain without leverage. (That means the money you allocate here should be one-third in TZA and two-thirds in cash, to offset the leverage.) And unlike the gold bugs, I see gold collapsing. It’s an inflation hedge, not a deflation hedge. If gold rallies back as high as $1,425—on my predicted bear-market rally—then it could easily drop to around $700 within a year. Your last decision is whether to risk some of your funds betting on gold’s downside, for the greatest potential returns. You can buy DB Gold Double Short ETN (NYSEArca: DZZ)—double short gold—at a half share, to offset the leverage, or just simply short GLD, the ETF that follows gold. There you have it. How to handle the coming crash.

My investment philosophy changed when I read Charles Ellis’ book Winning the Loser’s Game. The book was given to me by my employer at the time, Michael Goodman, founder of Wealthstream Advisors, Inc. Ellis convinced me that trying to beat the market is a losing proposition. In golf, par is a good score, and avoiding bogeys is more important than making birdies. Very few professional investors beat the market consistently, after accounting for the costs. The most important takeaway from Ellis’ books is that the market return is a good return. The proliferation of low-cost index funds means that the market return is ours for the taking, if only we accept it. I have not purchased an individual stock since reading that book.

That being said, a great time to invest in an index like the S&P 500 is during a bear market. If stock prices have been falling for 6 months or more, and there is a lot of pessimism in the air, it might be a good time to invest some extra money into index funds.

Each ETF represents a certain index. So the ETF for the S&P 500 trades under the ticker SPY. The ETF for the DJIA trades under the ticker DIA. And the ETF for the Nasdaq 100 trades under the ticker QQQ. You've probably heard of the QQQ. It is a great trading or investment vehicle. When you buy shares of the QQQ, you are getting exposure to Apple, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other tech (and some non-tech) stocks. If you buy the QQQ and hold it for the long-term, you will be able to profit from the long-term growth of the tech industry.

Today indexing is widely considered the safest and best way for most people to invest in the stock market. If you own the S&P 500 index, you are basically guaranteed to get the same long-term return of the U.S. large-cap stock market, less investment expenses.

Buying a stock index like the S&P 500 is a great way to get started investing. If you can, you should just buy some SPY and not look at it for the next 30 years. When you are indexing, it doesn't make any sense to check daily stock or index prices.

That being said, a great time to invest in an index like the S&P 500 is during a bear market.

Your index fund should not be your manager’s cash cow. It should be your own cash cow.

In June 1949 the S & P composite index sold at only 6.3 times the applicable earnings of the past 12 months; in March 1961 the ratio was 22.9 times. Similarly, the dividend yield on the S & P index had fallen from over 7% in 1949 to only 3.0% in 1961, a contrast heightened by the fact that interest rates on high-grade bonds had meanwhile risen from 2.60% to 4.50%. This is certainly the most remarkable turnabout in the public’s attitude in all stock-market history.

If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash

The ideal way to dollar-cost average is into a portfolio of index funds, which own every stock or bond worth having. That way, you renounce not only the guessing game of where the market is going but which sectors of the market—and which particular stocks or bonds within them—will do the best.

First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket).

Let’s say you can spare $500 a month. By owning and dollar-cost averaging into just three index funds—$300 into one that holds the total U.S. stock market, $100 into one that holds foreign stocks, and $100 into one that holds U.S. bonds—you can ensure that you own almost every investment on the planet that’s worth owning.

The general path to FIRE is to save 50 to 70 percent of your income, invest those savings in low-fee stock index funds, and retire in roughly ten years.

Examples of real estate mutual funds include: • Fidelity Real Estate Investment Portfolio (FRESX), a managed fund (so expect a higher expense ratio) that selects REITs with high-quality properties (mainly commercial and industrial) • Cohen & Steers Realty Shares (CSRSX), a managed fund that holds a targeted portfolio of forty to sixty commercial REITs • Vanguard Real Estate Index Fund Admiral Shares (VGSLX), a low-cost index fund that tracks a key REIT benchmark index (called the MSCI US Investable Market Real Estate 25/50 Index) • Cohen & Steers Quality Income Realty Fund (RQI), a closed-end fund that holds a variety of high-income-producing commercial REITs and real estate–related stocks

So in my total portfolio, including both my personal and retirement accounts, about 60% of my assets are in stocks, mostly in Vanguard’s stock index funds.

Throughout this book we’ll gradually build an argument that many individuals should consider an automatic approach to investing by relying primarily on mutual funds—specifically index mutual funds, which try to do nothing more than mimic the performance of the stock and bond markets in general.

The purpose of this chapter is to explain what it means for skillful investors to add value. To accomplish that, I’m going to introduce two terms from investment theory. One is beta, a measure of a portfolio’s relative sensitivity to market movements. The other is alpha, which I define as personal investment skill, or the ability to generate performance that is unrelated to movement of the market. As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to achieve the market return. A passive index fund will produce just that result by holding every security in a given market index in proportion to its equity capitalization. Thus, it mirrors the characteristics—e.g., upside potential, downside risk, beta or volatility, growth, richness or cheapness, quality or lack of same—of the selected index and delivers its return. It epitomizes investing without value added. Let’s say, then, that all equity investors start not with a blank sheet of paper but rather with the possibility of simply emulating an index. They can go out and passively buy a market-weighted amount of each stock in the index, in which case their performance will be the same as that of the index. Or they can try for outperformance through active rather than passive investing.

Active investors have a number of options available to them. First, they can decide to make their portfolio more aggressive or more defensive than the index, either on a permanent basis or in an attempt at market timing. If investors choose aggressiveness, for example, they can increase their portfolios’ market sensitivity by overweighting those stocks in the index that typically fluctuate more than the rest, or by utilizing leverage. Doing these things will increase the “systematic” riskiness of a portfolio, its beta. (However, theory says that while this may increase a portfolio’s return, the return differential will be fully explained by the increase in systematic risk borne. Thus doing these things won’t improve the portfolio’s risk-adjusted return.)

Active investors have a number of options available to them. First, they can decide to make their portfolio more aggressive or more defensive than the index, either on a permanent basis or in an attempt at market timing. If investors choose aggressiveness, for example, they can increase their portfolios’ market sensitivity by overweighting those stocks in the index that typically fluctuate more than the rest, or by utilizing leverage. Doing these things will increase the “systematic” riskiness of a portfolio, its beta. (However, theory says that while this may increase a portfolio’s return, the return differential will be fully explained by the increase in systematic risk borne. Thus doing these things won’t improve the portfolio’s risk-adjusted return.) Second, investors can decide to deviate from the index in order to exploit their stock-picking ability—buying more of some stocks in the index, underweighting or excluding others, and adding some stocks that aren’t part of the index. In doing so they will alter the exposure of their portfolios to specific events that occur at individual companies, and thus to price movements that affect only certain stocks, not the whole index. As the composition of their portfolios diverges from the index for “nonsystematic” (we might say “idiosyncratic”) reasons, their return will deviate as well. In the long run, however, unless the investors have superior insight, these deviations will cancel out, and their risk-adjusted performance will converge with that of the index.

Pro-risk, aggressive investors, for example, should be expected to make more than the index in good times and lose more in bad times. This is where beta comes in. By the word beta, theory means relative volatility, or the relative responsiveness of the portfolio return to the market return. A portfolio with a beta above 1 is expected to be more volatile than the reference market, and a beta below 1 means it’ll be less volatile. Multiply the market return by the beta and you’ll get the return that a given portfolio should be expected to achieve, omitting nonsystematic sources of risk. If the market is up 15 percent, a portfolio with a beta of 1.2 should return 18 percent (plus or minus alpha). Theory looks at this information and says the increased return is explained by the increase in beta, or systematic risk. It also says returns don’t increase to compensate for risk other than systematic risk. Why don’t they? According to theory, the risk that markets compensate for is the risk that is intrinsic and inescapable in investing: systematic or “non-diversifiable” risk. The rest of risk comes from decisions to hold individual stocks: non-systematic risk. Since that risk can be eliminated by diversifying, why should investors be compensated with additional return for bearing it? According to theory, then, the formula for explaining portfolio performance (y) is as follows: y = α + βx Here α is the symbol for alpha, β stands for beta, and x is the return of the market. The market-related return of the portfolio is equal to its beta times the market return, and alpha (skill-related return) is added to arrive at the total return (of course, theory says there’s no such thing as alpha). Although I dismiss the identity between risk and volatility, I insist on considering a portfolio’s return in the light of its overall riskiness, as discussed earlier. A manager who earned 18 percent with a risky portfolio isn’t necessarily superior to one who earned 15 percent with a lower-risk portfolio. Risk-adjusted return holds the key, even though—since risk other than volatility can’t be quantified—I feel it is best assessed judgmentally, not calculated scientifically.

If you ignore the primary trend, you are most likely going to lose money. The only time you should be buying stocks, index funds, or mutual funds is when the primary trend is advancing. But even then, you want to get in on the early stages of the advance. You don’t want to be the last one to the party.

such as the Cold Blood Index described on the Financial Hacker blog.

First of all, recognize that an index fund—which owns all the stocks in the market, all the time, without any pretense of being able to select the “best” and avoid the “worst”—will beat most funds over the long run.

Today’s defensive investor can do even better—by buying a total stock-market index fund that holds essentially every stock worth having. A low-cost index fund is the best tool ever created for low-maintenance stock investing—and any effort to improve on it takes more work (and incurs more risk and higher costs) than a truly defensive investor can justify.

Some smart people came up with the idea of the ETF ("exchange-traded fund"). An ETF trades just like a stock. You can buy or sell it all day long in your brokerage account. Each ETF represents a certain index. So the ETF for the S&P 500 trades under the ticker SPY. The ETF for the DJIA trades under the ticker DIA. And the ETF for the Nasdaq 100 trades under the ticker QQQ.

The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity . . . In place of humanity, they offer us the stock market index.

Types of Funds MUTUAL FUNDS. A group of stocks tracking a particular part of the stock market that can be traded only when the stock market is open. They are actively managed, meaning that you’ll pay an extra fee for an “expert” to pick stocks for you. EXCHANGE-TRADED FUNDS (ETFs). A group of stocks tracking a particular part of the stock market that can be traded at any time, even when the stock market is closed. Typically, ETFs are cheaper than a mutual fund, because they are passively managed (no manager to pay). INDEX FUNDS. One of the most popular choices in the personal finance community, an index fund is a mutual fund or an ETF that’s designed to track a particular part of the stock market, such as the S&P 500. I’m index funds’ biggest fan: they are diversified, extremely low in fees, and more stable than individual stocks.

The market internals tell us how many stocks are making new highs and new lows as the major market indexes are advancing. They also tell us the number of stocks advancing versus those that are declining. We are looking for divergences. For example, it is not a good sign to see more stocks hitting new lows than new highs while the major indices are hitting all-time highs. Similarly, it’s not a good sign to see total volume contracting while prices are breaking to new highs.

U.S. Total Stock Market Index Fund An International Total Stock Market Index Fund A U.S. Total Bond Market Index Fund

Two of my favorite portfolio analysis tools are Portfolio Visualizer and DIY.Fund. Portfolio Visualizer is a website which offers several of the best analysis tools for index fund investors, without a fee. On the other hand, DIY.Fund is an analysis tool for individual stock investors.

Only three of the groups studied showed up better than the S & P composite (and hence better than the DJIA), viz: (1) Industrials with the highest quality ranking (A+). These advanced 9½% in the period against a decline of 2.4% for the S & P industrials, and 5.6% for the DJIA. (However, the ten public-utility issues rated A+ declined 18% against a decline of 14% for the 55-stock S & P public-utility index.) It is worth remarking that the S & P rankings showed up very well in this single test. In every case a portfolio based on a higher ranking did better than a lower-ranking portfolio. (2) Companies with more than 50 million shares outstanding showed no change on the whole, as against a small decline for the indexes. (3) Strangely enough, stocks selling at a high price per share (over 100) showed a slight (1%) composite advance.

1) Vanguard Global Stock Index (Bolsa global) 2)    Vanguard Global Bond Index (Renta fija global).

Investors tend to pour more money into funds as the market rises. The managers use that new cash to buy more of the stocks they already own, driving prices to even more dangerous heights. If fund investors ask for their money back when the market drops, the managers may need to sell stocks to cash them out. Just as the funds are forced to buy stocks at inflated prices in a rising market, they become forced sellers as stocks get cheap again. Many portfolio managers get bonuses for beating the market, so they obsessively measure their returns against benchmarks like the S & P 500 index. If a company gets added to an index, hundreds of funds compulsively buy it. (If they don’t, and that stock then does well, the managers look foolish; on the other hand, if they buy it and it does poorly, no one will blame them.) Increasingly, fund managers are expected to specialize. Just as in medicine the general practitioner has given way to the pediatric allergist and the geriatric otolaryngologist, fund managers must buy only “small growth” stocks, or only “mid-sized value” stocks, or nothing but “large blend” stocks.6 If a company gets too big, or too small, or too cheap, or an itty bit too expensive, the fund has to sell it—even if the manager loves the stock. So there’s no reason you can’t

The best way to implement this strategy is indeed simple: Buy a fund that holds this all-market portfolio, and hold it forever. Such a fund is called an index fund. The index fund is simply a basket (portfolio) that holds many, many eggs (stocks) designed to mimic the overall performance of the U.S. stock market (or any financial market or market sector).

Not only did this gain Sharpe his PhD, but it eventually evolved into a seminal paper on what he called the “capital asset pricing model” (CAPM), a formula that investors could use to calculate the value of financial securities. The broader, groundbreaking implication of CAPM was introducing the concept of risk-adjusted returns—one had to measure the performance of a stock or a fund manager versus the volatility of its returns—and indicated that the best overall investment for most investors is the entire market, as it reflects the optimal tradeoff between risks and returns.

If you choose to invest in TDFs, I encourage you to “look under the hood” first. (Always a good idea!) Compare the costs of TDFs, and pay attention to their underlying structures. Many TDFs hold actively managed funds as components, whereas others use low-cost index funds. Make sure you know precisely what is in your TDF portfolio and how much you’re paying for it. The major actively managed TDFs have annual expense ratios that average 0.70 percent; index fund TDFs carry average expense ratios of 0.13 percent. It will not surprise you to know that I believe that low-cost, index-based target-date funds are likely to be your best option.

McQuown argued that a more scientific approach to investing was the future. In his telling, the traditional approach followed a version of the “Great Man” theory first espoused by the nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Some preternaturally gifted hero would pick stocks that he thought would rise. When his touch inevitably deserted him at some point—and in the 1960s it was invariably a “him”—the investor would simply transfer their hopes onto another Great Man. “The whole thing is a chance-driven process. It’s not systematic and there is lots we still don’t know about it and that needs study,” McQuown argued.

An Investor in Early Retirement Diversified domestic stocks 30% Diversified international stocks 10% Intermediate-term bonds 30% Inflation-Protected Securities 30% An Investor in Early Retirement Using Vanguard Funds Total Stock Market Index Fund 30% Total International Index Fund 10% Total Bond Market Index Fund 30% Inflation-Protected Securities 30%

Let’s say, for example, that you figure you’re 25% better than average at picking stocks, and you think you can earn 15% a year on your portfolio. That sounds realistic enough—until you consider the third question. The long-term average annual return on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of blue-chip stocks is 10.4%. If, however, you adjust that number for the cash that people added to and subtracted from their portfolios, the average return drops to just 8.6% annually since 1926. Factor in taxes, trading costs, and inflation, and the annual return of the typical investor drops below 4%. If you really are 25% better than average, you shouldn’t expect to earn much more than 5% annually after all your costs. You still might be able to earn 15% a year—if you are at least three times better than average. Only by asking all three questions can you tell just how crazy your inner con man is.

Sweden, workers who are not ready to choose their own pension investments can have the money placed automatically into a “default” fund, a low-cost index portfolio that blends stocks and bonds. In recent years, roughly 97% of eligible workers have left their money in the default fund, even though they were free to switch at any time to any of more than four hundred other funds. (Luckily, in this case, that’s not a bad choice.)

Into this situation, came the Reagan Administration’s bizarre collection of “free market” economic conundrums, called by their advocates, “Supply-Side” economics. The idea was thin cover for unleashing some of the highest rates of short-term personal profiteering in history, at the expense of the greater good of the country’s long-term economic health. While policies imposed after October 1982 to collect billions from Third World countries, brought a huge windfall of financial liquidity to the American banking system, the ideology of Wall Street, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan‘s zeal for lifting the government “shackles” off financial markets, resulted in the greatest extravaganza in world financial history. When the dust settled by the end of that decade, some began to realize that Reagan’s “free market” had destroyed an entire national economy. It happened to be the world’s largest economy, and the base of world monetary stability as well. On the simple-minded and quite mistaken argument that a mere removing of the tax burden on the individual or company would allow them to release “stifled creative energies” and other entrepreneurial talents, President Ronald Reagan signed the largest tax reduction bill in postwar history in August 1981. The bill contained provisions which also gave generous tax relief for certain speculative forms of real estate investment, especially commercial real estate. Government restrictions on corporate takeovers were also removed, and Washington gave the clear signal that “anything goes,” so long as it stimulated the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.

and even Saturn can not impress the S & P500 index.

It is fair to say the attendees of the carnival-like conference just outside Miami took little note of McNabb’s consternation. Investors have in recent years been able to buy niche, “thematic” ETFs that purport to benefit from—deep breath—the global obesity epidemic; online gaming; the rise of millennials; the whiskey industry; robotics; artificial intelligence; clean energy; solar energy; autonomous driving; uranium mining; better female board representation; cloud computing; genomics technology; social media; marijuana farming; toll roads in the developing world; water purification; reverse-weighted US stocks; health and fitness; organic food; elderly care; lithium batteries; drones; and cybersecurity. There was even briefly an ETF that invested in the stocks of companies exposed to the ETF industry. Some of these more experimental funds gain traction, but many languish and are eventually liquidated, the money recycled into the latest hot fad.

THE POWER OF MSCI, FTSE RUSSELL, and S&P Dow Jones Indices is largely over only stock markets. Of even greater and direct importance to countries are their presence and weighting in various influential bond market indices. These may not have the cachet of the brand-name stock market benchmarks bandied about on TV bulletins, but indices like the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate or JPMorgan’s EMBI and GBI-EM are also powerful in their own way.

Although financial markets are a wildly more dynamic game, with infinitely more permutations and without the fixed rules of poker, the metaphor is a compelling explanation for why markets actually appear to be becoming harder to beat even as the tide of passive investing continues to rise. Mediocre fund managers are simply being gradually squeezed out of the industry. At the same time, the number of individual investors—the proverbial doctors and dentists getting stock tips on the golf course and taking a bet—has gradually declined, depriving Wall Street of the steady stream of “dumb money” that provided suckers for the “smart money” of professional fund managers to take advantage of.

The data bears this out. In addition to a “persistence scorecard,” S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes snapshots of how many mutual funds beat their benchmarks. Most years, a majority underperform their indices, whatever the market. Over multiple years, the data becomes progressively grimmer. As of June 2020, only 15 percent of US stock-pickers had cumulatively managed to surpass their benchmark over the last decade. In bond markets, it is a similar tale, albeit varying depending on the flavor of fixed income. The data is more favorable for fund managers in more exotic, less efficient asset classes, such as emerging markets, but on the whole the data is clear that in the longer run most fund managers still underperform their passive rivals after fees.

To simplify Markowitz’s model, Sharpe stipulated one fundamental underlying factor—the return of the overall stock market—and instead calculated the variation of individual securities relative to this, rather than each security relative to each other. In his formula, it was given the Greek letter beta. So if Coca-Cola’s shares rise by 0.8 percentage points for every 1 percent the broader stock market climbs, it has a beta of 0.8. If a racier stock gains 2 percent, it has a beta of 2. Higher-beta stocks are more volatile, and should therefore offer greater returns than steadier, lower-beta securities. And thus beta became the lingua franca for the returns of the stock market as a whole, while “alpha” later emerged as the term for the extra returns generated by a skilled investor.

Moreover, Fama’s thesis—titled “The Behavior of Stock-Market Prices”—corroborated earlier work by the likes of Mandelbrot and Samuelson which argued that markets are close to random, and therefore impossible to predict. As the young economist wrote in the introduction, “The series of price changes has no memory, that is, the past cannot be used to predict the future in any meaningful way.”19

Fama proposed that in an efficient market, the competition among so many smart traders, analysts, and investors meant that at any given time, all known, relevant information was already reflected in stock prices. And new information would continually be baked into the price virtually instantaneously.

Inspired by Sharpe’s work, Fouse in 1969 recommended that Mellon launch a passive fund that would try to replicate only one of the big stock market indices, like the S&P 500 of America’s biggest companies. It got nixed by Mellon’s management. In the spring of 1970, he then proposed a fund that would systematically invest according to a dividend-based model devised by John Burr Williams—who had nearly two decades earlier inspired Markowitz’s work—but that too was summarily squashed. “Goddammit Fouse, you’re trying to turn my business into a science,” his boss told him.14

The plan was to invest an equal amount of money in each of the fifteen hundred or so stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange, as this was the closest approximation to the entire US equity market. And in July 1971, the first-ever passively managed, index-tracking fund was born, courtesy of an initial $6 million investment from Samsonite’s pension fund.

In the conclusion to his letter to the Post’s owner, Buffett therefore laid out his recommendations: Either stay the course with a bunch of big, mainstream professional fund managers and accept that the newspaper’s pension fund would likely do slightly worse than the market; find smaller, specialized investment managers who were more likely to be able to beat the market; or simply build a broad, diversified portfolio of stocks that mirrored the entire market. Buffett obliquely noted that “several funds have been established fairly recently to duplicate the averages, quite explicitly embodying the principle that no management is cheaper, and slightly better than average paid management after transaction costs.

In the end, the proceeds that actually went to Girls Inc. amounted to $2.2 million, thanks to a timely switch of the bet’s collateral from US Treasury bonds into Berkshire stock—highlighting how human discretion can still play a valuable role. The money helped finance a Girls Inc. program for vulnerable young women at a converted convent on the outskirts of Omaha, now appropriately renamed Protégé House.

However, inspired by the fund, WFIA in November 1973 launched a simpler fund open to all the bank’s institutional clients—seeded with $5 million from Wells Fargo’s own pension fund and an equal amount from Illinois Bell’s retirement system—that would simply seek to mimic the performance of the S&P 500.* At the time, this accounted for about two-thirds of the entire US stock market anyway,20 and the index was “capitalization-weighted”—in other words, the weighting of each company was according to its overall stock market value, and the fund would just have to buy an equal number of shares in each company. By 1976, Samsonite folded the money in its original vehicle into WFIA’s S&P 500 index fund.

The three pioneering efforts weren’t perfect index funds, in that they didn’t buy every single stock in the S&P 500. Doing so would be too costly at a time when Wall Street firms still charged fixed commissions, and the tradability of smaller stocks in the blue-chip index was still poor. They were also simply too small to be able to buy all the stocks. To varying degrees, they replicated the benchmark through a process known as sampling—picking a broad but smaller subset of stocks that would best match the overall index.

At Chicago, Booth also got to know another precocious student in the year below him—Rex Sinquefield. Both young students grew close to their professor and absorbed Fama’s acerbic view of fund managers. “I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers. But I don’t want to bad-mouth the astrologers,” the professor once quipped.