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Index funds explained

Choose these for good, hands-off, long-term investment strategies.

If you’re looking for a great way to invest in the long term, then you may want to look into index funds. Index funds are mutual funds that attempt to match a particular index as closely as possible. There are several ways that these funds can make a fund that represents the results of a market index. The two most common methods are to either invest in all of the companies in the index, or to invest in a sample. The sample method is less exact, however, it is difficult to invest in every single company, especially if one of he larger indexes is being matched.

The reason that index funds are good for a long-term investment is that most index funds do not have any real active management. Once the index fund has been established, there are not many changes to the amount of stocks that are from any one company. This means that the fund manager will not do very much trading – though that is definitely a good thing for you.

One of the benefits of less fund trading for you is that the taxes you will pay on investments will be lower. Not only that, but some of the fraud that has taken place with mutual funds is not possible if you have invested in an index fund – churning, for example, would set off warning bells immediately.

Therefore, if you are looking for a long-term and extremely hands-off way to invest your money in the future, then you may want to look into investing in index funds. Index fund portfolios rarely change, so you will know exactly what you are getting into when you invest in the index fund. You will also be able to figure out what your return is just by looking at how a particular market fund is doing overall. You won’t have to check on the results for a few individual stocks – assuming that your index fund has been well put together.

If you notice that your index fund is having performance that is considerably different from that of the market as a whole, you should look for a new index fund.