What is the Purpose of Indexes and Index Funds? (Part IV)

Index Investing – Opportunities and Obstacles

Legend has it, a pharmacist named John Pemberton was searching for a headache cure when he tried blending Coca leaves with Cola nuts. Who knew his recipe was destined to become such a smashing success, even if Coca-Cola® never did become the medicine Pemberton had in mind? In a similar vein, when Charles Dow launched the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the Dow), his aim was to better assess stock prices and market trends, hoping to determine when the market’s tides had turned by measuring the equivalent of its incoming and outgoing “waves.” He chose industrials (mostly railroads) because, as he proposed in 1882, “The industrial market is destined to be the great speculative market of the United States.”

While the actively minded Dow never did achieve market-timing clairvoyance (and neither has anyone else we’re aware of), he did devise the world’s first index. We’d like to think his creation turned into something even greater than what he’d intended – especially when Vanguard founder John Bogle and other pioneers leveraged Dow’s early work to created the most passive way to invest in today’s markets: the index fund. Bogle launched the first publicly available index fund in 1976. Initially dismissed by many as “Bogle’s folly,” its modern-day rendition, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, remains among the most familiar funds of any type.

Index Investing Is Born

In defense of Dow’s quest to forecast market movements, it’s worth remembering that his was a world in which electronic ticker tape was the latest technology, there were no open-ended mutual funds or fee-only financial advisors, and safeguards and regulations were few and far between. Essentially, speculating was the only way one could invest in late-nineteenth century markets. Compared to actively managed funds that seek to “beat” the market by engaging in these now-outdated speculative strategies, passively managed index funds offer a more solid solution for sensibly capturing available market returns.

As the name implies, an index fund buys and holds the securities tracked by a particular index, which is seeking to represent the performance of a particular slice of the market. For example, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund tracks the popular S&P 500 Index, which in turn approximately tracks the asset class of U.S. large-company stocks. Compared to actively managed solutions, index funds lend themselves well to helping investors more efficiently and effectively target these three pillars of sensible investing:

Index Investing: Room for Improvement

As we’ve described throughout this series, indexes weren’t specifically devised to be invested in. There’s often a lot going on underneath their seemingly simple structures that can lead to inefficiencies by those trying to retrofit their investment products on top of popular indexes.

Introducing Evidence-Based Investing

So, yes, index investing has its advantages … It also has inherent challenges. No wonder academically minded innovators from around the globe soon sought to improve on index investing’s best traits and minimize its weaknesses. In fact, many of these thought leaders were the same early adapters who introduced index fund investing to begin with. Building on index investing, they devised evidence-based investment funds, to offer several more advantages:

An Index Overview, Revisited

From describing an index’s basic functions, to exploring some of the intricacies of their construction, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this four-part series on indexing. To recap, indexes can help us explore what is going on in particular slices of our capital markets. In the right context, they also can help you compare your own investment performance against a common benchmark. Last but not least, you can invest in funds that track particular indexes.

Equally important, remember that indexes do not help us forecast what to expect next in the markets, nor do high-water markets such as “Dow 20,000” foretell whether it’s a good or bad time to buy, hold or sell your own market holdings. And, while low-cost, well-managed index funds may still play a role in your overall investment portfolio, it’s worth ensuring that you select them when they are the best fit for your evidence-based investment strategy, not simply because they are a popular choice at the time.

What else can we tell you about indexes or index investing? Let’s take a look at your unique financial goals, and see how indexing fits into your globally diversified world of investments.