- Monevator - https://monevator.com -

Weekend reading: The other benefits of index funds

Some good reads from around the web.

There is more to investing in index funds than pure cost saving [1] – a point well made by Rick Ferri in my post of the week [2]:

As I look back over the last 12 years, what is most impressive about index investing isn’t the rock bottom fees or respectable long-term returns, it’s how index investors avoided thousands of disasters in the marketplace that torpedoed the savings of millions of investors.

Index investors were not the victims of dozens of Ponzi scams or hundreds of multi-billion dollar corporate and municipal bankruptcies, nor were they they casualties of poor investment advice from self-proclaimed market experts.

When index funds fail [3], they fail because the market falls.

True, I do suspect we’ll see some unexpected incident some day – a good reason to avoid synthetic ETFs [4] – but at least index funds aren’t compromised at birth.

Happy Christmas to all our readers, and here’s to an enriching 2012!

Money and investing blogs

Deal of the week: Still trying to understand how the global economy got into such a mess? Philip Coogan’s new book Paper Promises [18] is receiving some praise. Not exactly full of Christmas cheer, mind.

Mainstream media money

Why not subscribe [31] (it’s free) to get more money-minded in 2012?