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Investing in index funds is considered as one of the best investments one can make because it provides broad diversification across a collective of stocks. This allows for someone to minimize losses by spreading out an investment over multiple companies but only investing in one asset. In just a single trade you own tech stocks, consumer stocks, utilities, real estate, and more.
Warren Buffet made a one million dollar bet that an S&P 500 index fund would beat the returns of an actively managed hedge fund over ten years and he won that bet by a landslide. The goal is to provide global access to index funds without the fees.
The S&P 500 Index was selected because it is a market-capitalization-weighted index of the 500 largest U.S. publicly traded companies. The index accounts for 80% of the market value of the U.S. equities market. The S&P 500 is also float-weighted index, meaning company market capitalizations are adjusted by the number of shares available for public trading. Below are the 10 largest companies of the S&P 500 as of December 31, 2020:
- Apple Inc. (AAPL)
- Microsoft Corp (MSFT)
- Amazon.com Inc (AMZN)
- Facebook Inc (FB)
- Tesla (TSLA)
- Alphabet Inc- A shares (GOOGL)
- Alphabet Inc- C shares (GOOG)
- Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B)
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
- JP Morgan Chase & Co (JPM)
The SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF, also known as the SPY ETF, is one of the most well-known funds that tracks the S&P 500 Index. The SPY has generated an average annual return of just under 10% since inception. Over the past three years the SPY has generated an average return of 13.25%. The SPY is well diversified and allocates its fund into multiple sections, such as 27.86% information technology, 13.34% healthcare, 10.44% financial services, 10.97% communication services, 8.12% industrials, 6.09% consumer staples, 12.96% consumer discretionary, 2.70% utilities, and 2.44% real estate.