Do you still doubt if you should invest in index funds or are you not really aware of what index funds are? At Stock Trend Investing, we have selected 10 articles that will give you quickly an overview of what is written and what one thinks about index funds.

From each article, we have taken a short quote, but we encourage you to read the original articles at the renowned sites as CBS MoneyWatch, Forbes, and NY Times etcetera. The titles below link to the original articles.

Best Index Funds: 8 picks (MoneyWatch.com)

“Low-cost index funds offer a remarkably simple plan for investing. They eliminate the anxiety and expense of trying to predict which individual stocks, bonds, or mutual funds will beat the market by buying and holding all the securities in the market as a whole.”

 

Picking The Right Index Fund (Forbes.com)

“Bottom line: Investors--professional as well as novice--would do themselves a favor by abandoning the effort to try to beat the market. A smarter move over the long term is to settle for tracking it at a low cost in fees and taxes. The way to do this is by owning index funds.”

Cheapest Index Tracker Funds (ThisIsMoney.co.uk)

“The industry likes to keep quiet about the fact that financial institutions invest a far greater proportion of their money in trackers than small investors. Not least because if the tracking philosophy is correct, then the entire investment management industry is redundant - including its highly paid experts. Many financial advisers simply cannot believe that a well-run fund will not do better than the index over the medium term.”

Intro to Index Funds (Forbes.com)

“In contrast, actively managed funds are run by money managers who aim to beat the market by buying and selling individual stocks based on their own criteria. With thousands of managers plying this trade, some invariably beat the market each year. Those are the ones who tend to get lauded as geniuses by a gushing financial media. Most fail dismally and with little fanfare.”

The S&P 500 Index Fund (Fool.com)

“In the intervening years Bogle has proven to be even more correct about indexing than he had predicted he might be. Since then, the gap between the performance of the market and the performance of actively managed mutual funds taken as a whole has actually been significantly wider than the 1.5% theorized by Bogle in 1976. During the 1990s, the total shortfall between actively managed mutual funds and the market as measured by the S&P 500 has so far been a whopping 3.4% per year.”

Advantages of Index Funds (Finance.Yahoo.com)

“Investing in stock index funds is often called passive investing, since the funds don't use the same active management techniques as other funds. Passive investing has two big advantages over active investing. First, a passive stock market mutual fund is much cheaper to run than an active fund. Eliminate those analysts' salaries and an index fund can cut its costs tremendously -- and those savings can be passed along to investors in the form of higher returns. The second main advantage of stock index funds is that they perform better than actively managed funds.”

The Index Funds Win Again (NYtimes.com)

“Professor Wermers said he believed that it was “exceedingly probable that any fund that has beaten the market by an average of more than one percentage point per year over the last decade achieved that return almost entirely due to luck alone.””

Should You sell your S&P 500 Index Fund? (MoneyWatch.com)

“Yes, 500 index fund investors will have to seek their small-cap exposure elsewhere, but history has demonstrated that they have little reason to fear being short-changed relative to the broader market.”

Investors are flocking to index funds (MoneyCentral.MSN.com)

“It may just come down to your personality. Indexers prefer a rather boring but fairly steady method, while others are enticed by the prospect of the sizable gains that active managers can achieve. When it comes to constructing a portfolio, every investor faces the same question: Do I trust a manager to pick the best stocks or put my faith in a fund that simply tracks a benchmark index?

Lately, investors have voted with their feet and chosen indexing over actively managed funds.”

Index Fund (Wikipedia.org)

“An index fund or index tracker is a collective investment scheme (usually a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund) that aims to replicate the movements of an index of a specific financial market, or a set of rules of ownership that are held constant, regardless of market conditions.”
 

If you know other great, informative articles about index funds, please place a comment with a quote from and link to that article.