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Originally Posted by jx2
A pot managed is a good thing. Some indexed mutual funds are not managed, therefore you have nobody to get in or out of good or bad stocks.
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Not sure that I follow you. As far as I know, every index fund is by definition managed in the sense that an investment is automatically distributed over the companies in that index and weighted to those companies' respective values in that index. So you buy the Vanguard 500 fund and their program "manages" it to the extent that you have bought essentially an appropriately weighted share of each company in the S&P 500, more or less, which is to say that you've more or less bought an appropriately weighted piece of the U.S. stock market. That in turn means that it doesn't really matter if you've got some money in a bad business in that index, because that's like complainin that you've got some money in a particular company and one department of that company is losing money even when the company overall is profiting. I mean, you buy the that index and let's say AT&T or CAT take hits, you've still got Microsoft and Boeing and, well, about 500 others that are breaking even or doing well. Unless
the stock market tanks, you're not going to tank. And the stock market, as measured by the S&P 500, at least, has done quite well for quite a long time.
What's impressive is how consistently this type of management (or whatever you want to call it) outperforms what we normally think of as management in the regular mutual fund sense, meaning one or more guys sitting around in conference rooms gambling with your money, essentially, and also collecting much heftier fees for doing so (since of course once the programming on an index fund is in place, you're essentially done with the labor aspect of it). I think the index fund idea answers the question your comment begs: who's determining which are the stocks to get into in the first place, and how good are those choices? There seem to be precious few regular mutual funds, indeed, who can match index fund returns, given what I've read (though of course you will get variation depending on the mutual and index funds you compare).
However I have the impression that mutual funds are like congressmen: people may not have a hard time with the idea that their performance by and large may be crappy, but people almost always have a hard time accepting that their
own's performance might be crappy.
Steve