Are there any funds tracking INDEXDJX:REIT?
Although you can't invest in an index, you can invest in a fund that basically invests in what the index is made up of. Example: In dealing with an auto index, you could find a fund that buys car companies's stock. The Google Finance list of funds dealing with INDEXDJX:REIT Although not pertaining to your quetion exactly, you may want to consider buying into Vanguard REIT ETF I hope this answers your question.
"Beatrice does a good job of summarizing things.  Tracking the index yourself is expensive (transaction costs) and tedious (number of transactions, keeping up with the changes, etc.)  One of the points of using an index fund is to reduce your workload.  Diversification is another point, though that depends on the indexes that you decide to use.  That said, even with a relatively narrow index you diversify in that segment of the market. A point I'd like to add is that the management which occurs for an index fund is not exactly ""active.""  The decisions on which stocks to select are already made by the maintainers of the index.  Thus, the only management that has to occur involves the trades required to mimic the index." "The majority (about 80%) of mutual funds are underperforming their underlying indexes. This is  why ETFs have seen massive capital inflows compared to equity funds, which have seen significant withdrawals in the last years.  I would definitively recommend going with an ETF. In addition to pure index based ETFs that (almost) track broad market indexes like the S&P 500 there are quite a few more ""quant"" oriented ETFs that even outperformed the S&P. I am long the S&P trough iShares ETFs and have dividend paying ETFs and some quant ETFS on top (Invesco Powershares) in my portfolio." index ETF tracks indented index (if fund manager spend all money on Premium Pokemon Trading Cards someone must cover resulting losses) Most Index ETF are passively managed. ie a computer algorithm would do automatic trades. The role of fund manager is limited. There are controls adopted by the institution that generally do allow such wide deviations, it would quickly be flagged and reported. Most financial institutions have keyman fraud insurance. fees are not higher that specified in prospectus Most countries have regulation where fees need to be reported and cannot exceed the guideline specified. at least theoretically possible to end with ETF shares that for weeks cannot be sold Yes some ETF's can be illiquid at difficult to sell. Hence its important to invest in ETF that are very liquid. Now, if I'm not mistaken, tracking a value-weighted index is extremely easy - just buy the shares in the exact amount they are in the index and wait. Yes in theory. In practise this is difficult. Most funds that track S&P do it on sample basis. This is to maintain the fund size. Although I don't have / know the exact number ... if one wants to replicate the 500 stocks in the same %, one would need close to billion in fund size. As funds are not this large, there are various strategies adopted, including sampling of companies [i.e. don't buy all]; select a set of companies that mimic the S&P behaviour, etc. All these strategies result in tracking errors. There are algorithms to reduce this. The only time you would need to rebalance your holdings is when there is a change in the index, i.e. a company is dropped and a new one is added, right? So essentially rebalance is done to; If so, why do passive ETFs require frequent rebalancing and generally lose to their benchmark index? lets take an Index with just 3 companies, with below price. The total Market cap is 1000  The Minimum required to mimic this index is 200 or Multiples of 200. If so you are fine.    More Often, funds can't be this large. For example approx 100 funds track the S&P Index. Together they hold around 8-10% of Market Cap. Few large funds like Vangaurd, etc may hold around 2%. But most of the 100+ S&P funds hold something in 0.1 to 0.5 range. So lets say a fund only has 100. To maintain same proportion it has to buy shares in fraction. But it can only buy shares in whole numbers. This would then force the fund manager to allocate out of proportion, some may remain cash, etc. As you can see below illustrative, there is a tracking error. The fund is not truly able to mimic the index.  Now lets say after 1st April, the share price moved, now this would mean more tracking error if no action is taken [block 2] ... and less tracking error if one share of company B is sold and one share of company C is purchased.  Again the above is a very simplified view. Tracking error computation is involved mathematics.  Now that we have the basic concepts, more often funds tracking S&P; Thus they need to rebalance. News-driven investors tend to be very short-term focussed investors. They often trade by using index futures (on the S&P 500 index for instance). "You asked 3 questions here. It's best to keep them separate as these are pretty distinct, different answers, and each might already have a good detailed answer and so might be subject to ""closed as duplicate of..."" That said, I'll address the JAGLX question (1). It's not an apples to apples comparison. This is a Life Sciences fund, i.e. a very specialized fund, investing in one narrow sector of the market. If you study market returns over time, it's easy to find sectors that have had a decade or even two that have beat the S&P by a wide margin. The 5 year comparison makes this pretty clear. For sake of comparison, Apple had twice the return of JAGLX during the past 5 years. The advisor charging 2% who was heavy in Apple might look brilliant, but the returns are not positively correlated to the expense involved. A 10 or 20 year lookback will always uncover funds or individual stocks that beat the indexes, but the law of averages suggests that the next 10 or 20 years will still appear random." Not to my knowledge. Often the specific location is diversified out of the fund because each major building company or real estate company attempts to diversify  risk by spreading it over multiple geographical locations. Also, buyers of these smaller portfolios will again diversify by creating a larger fund to sell to the general public. That being said, you can sometimes drill down to the specific assets held by a real estate fund. That takes a lot of work: You can also look for the issuer of the bond that the construction or real estate company issued to find out if it is region specific. Hope that helps. I tried direct indexing the S&amp;P500 myself and it was a lot of work. Lots of buys and sells to rebalance, tons of time in spreadsheets running calculations/monitoring etc, dealing with stocks being added or removed from the index, adding money (inflows). Etc. All of the work is the main reason I stopped. I came to realize the 0.05% I pay Vanguard is a great deal. Over the past five years, QFVOX has returned 13.67%, compared to the index fund SPY that has returned 50.39%. SEVAX has lost 23.96%. AKREX has returned 81.82%. In two of your three examples, you would have done much better in an index fund with a very low expense ratio as suggested. While one can never, as you see, make a generalization, in almost every case, most investors will do better, and often much better, with an index fund with a low expense ratio. My source was Google Finance. ACWI refers to a fund that tracks the MSCI All Country World Index, which is  A market capitalization weighted index designed to provide a broad measure of equity-market performance throughout the world. The MSCI ACWI is maintained by Morgan Stanley Capital International, and is comprised of stocks from both developed and emerging markets.  The ex-US in the name implies exactly what it sounds; this fund probably invests in stock markets (or stock market indexes) of the countries in the index, except the US. Brd Mkt refers to a Broad Market index, which, in the US, means that the fund attempts to track the performance of a wide swath of the US stock market (wider than just the S&P 500, for example). The Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index, the Wilshire 5000 index, the Russell 2000 index, the MSCI US Broad Market Index, and the CRSP US Total Market Index are all examples of such an index. This could also refer to a fund similar to the one above in that it tracks a broad swath of the several stock markets across the world. I spoke with BNY Mellon about the rest, and they told me this: EB - Employee Benefit (a bank collective fund for ERISA qualified assets) DL - Daily Liquid (provides for daily trading of fund shares) SL - Securities Lending (fund engages in the BNY Mellon securities lending program) Non-SL - Non-Securities Lending (fund does not engage in the BNY Mellon securities lending program) I'll add more detail. EB (Employee Benefit) refers to plans that fall under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which are a set a laws that govern employee pensions and retirement plans. This is simply BNY Mellon's designation for funds that are offered through 401(k)'s and other retirement vehicles. As I said before, DL refers to Daily Liquidity, which means that you can buy into and sell out of the fund on a daily basis. There may be fees for this in your plan, however. SL (Securities Lending) often refers to institutional funds that loan out their long positions to investment banks or brokers so that the clients of those banks/brokerages can sell the shares short. This SeekingAlpha article has a good explanation of how this procedure works in practice for ETF's, and the procedure is identical for mutual funds: An exchange-traded fund lends out shares of its holdings to another party and charges a rental fee. Running a securities-lending program is another way for an ETF provider to wring more return out of a fund's holdings. Revenue from these programs is used to offset a fund's expenses, which allows the provider to charge a lower expense ratio and/or tighten the performance gap between an ETF and its benchmark. At this time, Google Finance doesn't support historical return or dividend data, only share prices.  The attributes for mutual funds such as return52 are only available as real-time data, not historical.   Yahoo also does not appear to offer market return data including dividends. For example, the S&P 500 index does not account for dividends--the S&P ^SPXTR index does, but is unavailable through Yahoo Finance. "What does ETFs have to do with this or Amazon?   Actually, investing in ETFs means you are killing actively managed Mutual Funds (managed by people, fund managers) to get an average return (and loss) of the market that a computer manage instead of a person. And the ETF will surely have Amazon stocks because they are part of the index.  I only invest in actively managed mutual funds. Yes, most actively managed mutual funds can't do better than the index, but if you work a bit harder, you can find the many that do much better than the ""average"" that an index give you." It would involve manual effort, but there is just a handful of exclusions,  buy the fund you want, plug into a tool like Morningstar Instant X Ray,  find out your $10k position includes $567.89 of defense contractor Lockheed Martin,  and sell short $567.89 of Lockheed Martin.  Check you're in sync periodically (the fund or index balance may change); when you sell the fund close your shorts too. A general mutual fund's exact holdings are not known on a day-to-day basis, and so technical tools must work with inexact data. Furthermore, the mutual fund shares' NAV depends on lots of different shares that it holds, and the  results of the kinds of analyses that one can do for a single stock must be commingled to produce something analogous for the fund's NAV. In other words, there is plenty of shooting in the dark going on. That being said, there are plenty of  people who claim to do such analyses and will gladly sell you their results (actually, Buy, Hold, Sell recommendations) for whole fund families (e.g. Vanguard) in the form of a monthly or weekly Newsletter delivered by US Mail (in the old days) or electronically (nowadays). Some people who subscribe to such newsletters swear by them, while others swear at them and don't renew their subscriptions; YMMV. Here's a very simple answer, ask your broker/bank.  Mine uses ofx.  When asked if they would reimburse me for any unauthorized activity, the answer was no.  Simple enough, the banks that use it don't feel its secure enough.