Index Fund Quotes

Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming more and more popular, by and large it's not the individual investors that are doing it. It's the institutions.

My favourite holdings are Vanguard's Wellington Fund, a balanced mutual fund which is a legacy investment from my first career at Wellington Management Co., and the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

The index fund always gives you the market return.

Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find that the best way to own common stocks (shares') is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results (after fees and expenses) of the great majority of investment professionals.

By periodically investing in an index fund, the know-nothing investors can actually outperform most investment professionals.

After a lifetime of picking stocks, I have to admit that Bogle's arguments in favor of the index fund have me thinking of joining him rather than trying to beat him. Bogle's wisdom and common sense are indispensable... for anyone trying to figure out how to invest in this crazy stock market.

Indexing is a successful approach to investing not because it's simple, but because it has performed so much better than the average active manager (the opposite of indexing), and the simplicity is just an added bonus.

Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that's essentially the idea behind the index fund.

It's bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.

An index fund is a fund that simply invests in all of the stocks in a market. So, for example, an index fund might invest in every single stock or almost every single stock in the U.S. market, it might invest in every single stock abroad, or it might invest in all of the bonds that are out there. And you can make a perfectly fine investing portfolio that mixes equal parts of all three of those.

Index investing is an investment strategy that Walter Mitty would love. It takes very little investment knowledge, no skill, practically no time or effort-and outperforms about 80 percent of all investors.

If you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years -you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.

Everybody has a different strategy, but everybody agrees that active management does not beat the market.

The commission of the investment sins listed above is not limited to 'the little guy.' Huge institutional investors, viewed as a group, have long underperformed the unsophisticated index-fund investor who simply sits tight for decades. A major reason has been fees: Many institutions pay substantial sums to consultants who, in turn, recommend high-fee managers. And that is a fool's game.

The scary truth is 96 percent of mutual funds fail to match the market, and the 4 percent that do, they're always changing.

We need a federal government commission to study the way our financial services system is working - I believe it is working badly - and we also need more educated investors. There are good long term low-priced mutual funds - my favorite is a total stock market index fund - and bad short term highly priced mutual funds. If investors would get themselves educated, and invest in the former - taking their money out of the latter - we would see some automatic improvements in the system, and see them fairly quickly.

The best way in my view is to just buy a low-cost index fund and keep buying it regularly over time, because you'll be buying into a wonderful industry, which in effect is all of American industry... People ought to sit back and relax and keep accumulating over time.

There no longer can be any doubt that the creation of the first index mutual fund was the most successful innovation - especially for investors - in modern financial history.

The key aspect of an index fund is that many of them, not all of them, but many of them are extremely cheap.

A low-cost index fund is the most sensible equity investment for the great majority of investors. My mentor, Ben Graham, took this position many years ago, and everything I have seen since convinces me of its truth.