Basic index fund questions
"There are no guarantees in the stock market. The index fund can send you a prospectus which shows what their results have been over the past decade or so, or you can find that info on line, but ""past results are not a guarantee of future performance"". Returns and risk generally trade off against each other; trying for higher than average results requires accepting higher than usual risk, and you need to decide which types of investments, in what mix, balance those in a way you are comfortable with. Reinvested dividends are exactly the same concept as compounded interest in a bank account. That is, you get the chance to earn interest on the interest, and then interest on the interest on the interest; it's a (slow) exponential growth curve, not just linear. Note that this applies to any reinvestment of gains, not just automatic reinvestment back into the same fund -- but automatic reinvestment is very convenient as a default. This is separate from increase in value due to growth in value of the companies. Yes, you will get a yearly report with the results, including the numbers needed for your tax return. You will owe income tax on any dividends or sales of shares. Unless the fund is inside a 401k or IRA, it's just normal property and you can sell or buy shares at any time and in any amount. Of course the advantage of investing through those special retirement accounts is advantageous tax treatment, which is why they have penalties if you use the money before retirement. Re predicting results: Guesswork and rule of thumb and hope that past trends continue a bit longer. Really the right answer is not to try to predict precise numbers, but to make a moderately conservative guess, hope you do at least that well, and be delighted if you do better... And to understand that you can lose value, and that losses often correct themselves if you can avoid having to sell until prices have recovered. You can, of course, compute historical results exactly, since you know how much you put in when, how much you took out when, and how much is in the account now. You can either look at how rate of return varied over time, or just compute an average rate of return; both approaches can be useful when trying to compare one fund against another... I get an approximate version of this reported by my financial management software, but mostly ignore it except for amusement and to reassure myself that things are behaving approximately as expected. (As long as I'm outperforming what I need to hit my retirement goals, I'm happy enough and unwilling to spend much more time on it... and my plans were based on fairly conservative assumptions.) If you invest $3k, it grows at whatever rate it grows, and ten years later you have $3k+X. If you then invest another $10k, you now have $3k+X+10k, all of which grows at whatever rate the fund now grows. When you go to sell shares or fractional shares, your profit has to be calculated based on when those specific shares were purchased and how much you paid for them versus when they were sold and how much you sold them for; this is a more annoying bit of record keeping and accounting than just reporting bank account interest, but many/most brokerages and investment banks will now do that work for you and report it at the end of the year for your taxes, as I mentioned."
"Instead of using the actual index, use a mutual fund as a proxy for the index. Mutual funds will include dividend income, and usually report data on the value of a ""hypothetical $10,000 investment"" over the life of the fund. If you take those dollar values and normalize them, you should get what you want. There are so many different factors that feed into general trends that it will be difficult to draw conclusions from this sort of data. Things like news flow, earnings reporting periods, business cycles, geopolitical activity, etc all affect the various sectors of the economy differently." What is your time horizon? Over long horizons, you absolutely want to minimise the expense ratio – a seemingly puny 2% fee p.a. can cost you a third of your savings over 35 years. Over short horizons, the cost of trading in and trading out might matter more. A mutual fund might be front-loaded, i.e. charge a fixed initial percentage when you first purchase it. ETFs, traded daily on an exchange just like a stock, don't have that. What you'll pay there is the broker commission, and the bid-ask spread (and possibly any premium/discount the ETF has vis-a-vis the underlying asset value).  Another thing to keep in mind is tracking error: how closely does the fond mirror the underlying index it attempts to track? More often than not it works against you. However, not sure there is a systematic difference between ETFs and funds there. Size and age of a fund can matter, indeed - I've had new and smallish ETFs that didn't take off close down, so I had to sell and re-allocate the money. Two more minor aspects: Synthetic ETFs and lending to short sellers. 1) Some ETFs are synthetic, that is, they don't buy all the underlying shares replicating the index, actually owning the shares. Instead, they put the money in the bank and enter a swap with a counter-party, typically an investment bank, that promises to pay them the equivalent return of holding that share portfolio. In this case, you have (implicit) credit exposure to that counter-party - if the index performs well, and they don't pay up, well, tough luck. The ETF was relying on that swap, never really held the shares comprising the index, and won't necessarily cough up the difference. 2) In a similar vein, some (non-synthetic) ETFs hold the shares, but then lend them out to short sellers, earning extra money. This will increase the profit of the ETF provider, and potentially decrease your expense ratio (if they pass some of the profit on, or charge lower fees). So, that's a good thing. In case of an operational screw up, or if the short seller can't fulfil their obligations to return the shares, there is a risk of a loss.  These two considerations are not really a factor in normal times (except in improving ETF expense ratios), but during the 2009 meltdown they were floated as things to consider. Mutual funds and ETFs re-invest or pay out dividends. For a given mutual fund, you might be able to choose, while ETFs typically are of one type or the other. Not sure how tax treatment differs there, though, sorry (not something I have to deal with in my jurisdiction).  As a rule of thumb though, as alex vieux says, for a popular index, ETFs will be cheaper over the long term. Very low cost mutual funds, such as Vanguard, might be competitive though. Picking yourself is just what all the fund managers are trying to do, and history shows that the majority of them fails the majority of the time to beat the index fund. That is the core reason of the current run after index funds. What that means is that although it doesn’t sound so hard, it is not easy at all to beat an index consistently. Of course you can assume that you are better than all those high-paid specialists, but I would have some doubt. You might be luckier, but then you might be not. "Funds - especially index funds - are a safe way for beginning investors to get a diversified investment across a lot of the stock market. They are not the perfect investment, but they are better than the majority of mutual funds, and you do not spend a lot of money in fees. Compared to the alternative - buying individual stocks based on what a friend tells you or buying a ""hot"" mutual fund - it's a great choice for a lot of people. If you are willing to do some study, you can do better - quite a bit better - with common stocks. As an individual investor, you have some structural advantages; you can take significant (to you) positions in small-cap companies, while this is not practical for large institutional investors or mutual fund managers.  However, you can also lose a lot of money quickly in individual stocks. It pays to go slow and to your homework, however, and make sure that you are investing, not speculating. I like fool.com as a good place to start, and subscribe to a couple of their newsletters. I will note that investing is not for the faint of heart; to do well, you may need to do the opposite of what everybody else is doing; buying when the market is down and selling when the market is high. A few people mentioned the efficient market hypothesis. There is ample evidence that the market is not efficient; the existence of the .com and mortgage bubbles makes it pretty obvious that the market is often not rationally valued, and a couple of hedge funds profited in the billions from this." "The root of the advice Bob is being given is from the premise that the market is temporarily down.    If the market is temporarily down, then the stocks in ""Fund #1"" are on-sale and likely to go up soon (soon is very subjective).     If the market is going to go up soon (again subjective) you are probably better in fictitious Fund #1.    This is the valid logic that is being used by the rep.   I don't think this is manipulative based on costs.    It's really up to Bob whether he agrees with that logic or if he disagrees with that logic and to make his own decision based on that. If this were my account, I would make the decision on where to withdraw based on my target asset allocation. Bob (for good or bad reasons) decided on 2/3 Fund 1 and 1/3 Fund 2. I'd make the withdraw that returns me to my target allocation of 2/3 Fund 1 and 1/3 Fund 2. Depending on performance and contributions, that might be selling Fund 1, selling Fund 2, or selling some of both." "The argument you are making here is similar to the problem I have with the stronger forms of the efficient market hypothesis.  That is if the market already has incorporated all of the information about the correct prices, then there's no reason to question any prices and then the prices never change.  However, the mechanism through which the market incorporates this information is via the actors buying an selling based on what they see as the market being incorrect. The most basic concept of this problem (I think) starts with the idea that every investor is passive and they simply buy the market as one basket.  So every paycheck, the index fund buys some more stock in the market in a completely static way.  This means the demand for each stock is the same.  No one is paying attention to the actual companies' performance so a poor performer's stock price never moves.  The same for the high performer.  The only thing moving prices is demand but that's always up at a more or less constant rate. This is a topic that has a lot of discussion lately in financial circles.  Here are two articles about this topic but I'm not convinced the author is completely serious hence the ""worst-case scenario"" title. These are interesting reads but again, take this with a grain of salt.  You should follow the links in the articles because they give a more nuanced understanding of each potential issue.  One thing that's important is that the reality is nothing like what I outline above. One of the links in these articles that is interesting is the one that talks about how we now have more indexes than stocks on the US markets.  The writer points to this as a problem in the first article, but think for a moment why that is.  There are many different types of strategies that active managers follow in how they determine what goes in a fund based on different stock metrics.  If a stocks P/E ratio drops below a critical level, for example, a number of indexes are going to sell it.  Some might buy it.  It's up to the investors (you and me) to pick which of these strategies we believe in. Another thing to consider is that active managers are losing their clients to the passive funds.  They have a vested interest in attacking passive management." "Trying to ""time the market"" is usually a bad idea. People who do this every day for a living have a hard time doing that, and I'm guessing you don't have that kind of time and knowledge.  So that leaves you with your first and third options, commonly called lump-sum and dollar cost averaging respectively.   Which one to use depends on where your preferences lie on the risk/reward scpectrum. Dollar cost averaging (DCA) has lower risk and lower reward than lump sum investing. In my opinion, I don't like it. DCA only works better than lump sum investing if the price drops. But if you think the price is going to drop, why are you buying the stock in the first place? Example: Your uncle wins the lottery and gives you $50,000. Do you buy $50,000 worth of Apple now, or do you buy $10,000 now and $10,000 a quarter for the next four quarters? If the stock goes up, you will make more with lump-sum(LS) than you will with DCA. If the stock goes down, you will lose more with LS than you will with DCA. If the stock goes up then down, you will lose more with DCA than you will with LS. If the stock goes down then up, you will make more with DCA than you will with LS. So it's a trade-off. But, like I said, the whole point of you buying the stock is that you think it's going to go up, which is especially true with an index fund! So why pick the strategy that performs worse in that scenario?" "Can you easily stomach the risk of higher volatility that could come with smaller stocks? How certain are you that the funds wouldn't have any asset bloat that could cause them to become large-cap funds for holding to their winners? If having your 401(k) balance get chopped in half over a year doesn't give you any pause or hesitation, then you have greater risk tolerance than a lot of people but this is one of those things where living through it could be interesting. While I wouldn't be against the advice, I would consider caution on whether or not the next 40 years will be exactly like the averages of the past or not. In response to the comments: You didn't state the funds so I how I do know you meant index funds specifically? Look at ""Fidelity Low-Priced Stock"" for a fund that has bloated up in a sense. Could this happen with small-cap funds? Possibly but this is something to note. If you are just starting to invest now, it is easy to say, ""I'll stay the course,"" and then when things get choppy you may not be as strong as you thought. This is just a warning as I'm not sure you get my meaning here. Imagine that some women may think when having a child, ""I don't need any drugs,"" and then the pain comes and an epidural is demanded because of the different between the hypothetical and the real version. While you may think, ""I'll just turn the cheek if you punch me,"" if I actually just did it out of the blue, how sure are you of not swearing at me for doing it? Really stop and think about this for a moment rather than give an answer that may or may not what you'd really do when the fecal matter hits the oscillator. Couldn't you just look at what stocks did the best in the last 10 years and just buy those companies? Think carefully about what strategy are you using and why or else you could get tossed around as more than a few things were supposed to be the ""sure thing"" that turned out to be incorrect like the Dream Team of Long-term Capital Management, the banks that were too big to fail, the Japanese taking over in the late 1980s, etc. There are more than a few times where things started looking one way and ended up quite differently though I wonder if you are aware of this performance chasing that some will do." More importantly, index funds are denominated in specific currencies. You can't buy or sell an index, so it can be dimensionless. Anything you actually do to track the index involves real amounts of real money. Your link is pointing to managed funds where the fees are higher, you should look at their exchange traded funds; you will note that the management fees are much lower and better reflect the index fund strategy. ... can someone explain to me why vanguard of all companies would be asking for this? If they're a company based on broad index funds, then whether or not exxon or Chevron or whoever else has climate change risk is irrelevant to that model, right? My plan is that one day I can become free of the modern day monetary burdens that most adults carry with them and I can enjoy a short life without these troubles on my mind. If your objective is to achieve financial independence, and to be able to retire early from the workforce, that's a path that has been explored before. So there's plenty of sources that you might want to check.  The good news is that you don't need to be an expert on security analysis or go through dozens of text books to invest wisely and enjoy the market returns. This is the Bogleheads philosophy. It's widely accepted by people in academia, and thoroughly tested. Look into it further if you want to see the rationale behind, but, to sum it up: It doesn't matter how expert you are. The idea of beating the market, that an index fund tracks, is about 'outsmarting' the rest of investors. That would be difficult, even if it was a matter of skill, but when it comes to predicting random events we're all equally clueless.  *Total Expense Ratio: It gives an idea of how expensive is a given fund in terms of fees. Actively managed funds have higher TER than indexed ones. This doesn't mean there aren't index funds with, unexplainable, high TER out there. "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." Current evidence is that, after you subtract their commission and the additional trading costs, actively managed funds average no better than index funds, maybe not as well. You can afford to take more risks at your age, assuming that it will be a long time before you need these funds -- but I would suggest that means putting a high percentage of your investments in small-cap and large-cap stock indexes. I'd suggest 10% in bonds, maybe more, just because maintaining that balance automatically encourages buy-low-sell-high as the market cycles. As you get older and closer to needing a large chunk of the money (for a house, or after retirement), you would move progressively more of that to other categories such as bonds to help safeguard your earnings.  Some folks will say this an overly conservative approach. On the other hand, it requires almost zero effort and has netted me an average 10% return (or so claims Quicken) over the past two decades, and that average includes the dot-bomb and the great recession. Past results are not a guarantee of future performance, of course, but the point is that it can work quite well enough. There are at least a couple of ways you could view this to my mind: Make an Excel spreadsheet and use the IRR function to compute the rate of return you are having based on money being added. Re-invested distributions in a mutual fund aren't really an additional investment as the Net Asset Value of the fund will drop by the amount of the distribution aside from market fluctuation. This is presuming you want a raw percentage that could be tricky to compare to other funds without doing more than a bit of work in a way. Look at what is the fund's returns compared to both the category and the index it is tracking. The tracking error is likely worth noting as some index funds could lag the index by a sizable margin and thus may not be that great. At the same time there may exist cases where an index fund isn't quite measuring up that well. The Small-Growth Indexing Anomaly would be the William Bernstein article from 2001 that has some facts and figures for this that may be useful.