A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as short selling, leverage, and derivatives. Financial regulators generally restrict hedge fund marketing except to institutional investors, high net worth individuals and others who are considered sufficiently sophisticated.
Passive management is an investing strategy that tracks a market-weighted index or portfolio. Passive management is most common on the equity market, where index funds track a stock market index, but it is becoming more common in other investment types, including bonds, commodities and hedge funds.
An index fund is a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to follow certain preset rules so that the fund can track a specified basket of underlying investments. While index providers often emphasize that they are for-profit organizations, index providers have the ability to act as "reluctant regulators" when determining which companies are suitable for an index. Those rules may include tracking prominent indexes like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average or implementation rules, such as tax-management, tracking error minimization, large block trading or patient/flexible trading strategies that allow for greater tracking error but lower market impact costs. Index funds may also have rules that screen for social and sustainable criteria.
A mutual fund is an open-end professionally managed investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities. Mutual funds are "the largest proportion of equity of U.S. corporations." Mutual fund investors may be retail or institutional in nature. The term is typically used in the United States, Canada, and India, while similar structures across the globe include the SICAV in Europe and open-ended investment company (OEIC) in the UK.
An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund and exchange-traded product, i.e. they are traded on stock exchanges. ETFs are similar in many ways to mutual funds, except that ETFs are bought and sold throughout the day on stock exchanges while mutual funds are bought and sold based on their price at day's end. An ETF holds assets such as stocks, bonds, currencies, and/or commodities such as gold bars, and generally operates with an arbitrage mechanism designed to keep it trading close to its net asset value, although deviations can occasionally occur. Most ETFs are index funds: that is, they hold the same securities in the same proportions as a certain stock market index or bond market index. The most popular ETFs in the U.S. replicate the S&P 500 Index, the total market index, the NASDAQ-100 index, the price of gold, the "growth" stocks in the Russell 1000 Index, or the index of the largest technology companies. With the exception of non-transparent actively managed ETFs, in most cases, the list of stocks that each ETF owns, as well as their weightings, is posted daily on the website of the issuer. The largest ETFs have annual fees of 0.03% of the amount invested, or even lower, although specialty ETFs can have annual fees well in excess of 1% of the amount invested. These fees are paid to the ETF issuer out of dividends received from the underlying holdings or from selling assets.
Putnam Investments is a privately owned investment management firm founded in 1937 by George Putnam, who established one of the first balanced mutual funds, The George Putnam Fund of Boston. As one of the oldest mutual fund complexes in the United States, Putnam has over $183 billion in assets under management, 79 individual mutual fund offerings, 96 institutional clients, and over seven million shareholders and retirement plan participants.
The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania with about $6.2 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 31, 2020. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the world after BlackRock's iShares. In addition to mutual funds and ETFs, Vanguard offers brokerage services, variable and fixed annuities, educational account services, financial planning, asset management, and trust services. Several mutual funds managed by Vanguard are ranked at the top of the list of US mutual funds by assets under management. Along with BlackRock and State Street, Vanguard is considered one of the Big Three index funds that dominate corporate America.
Michael Lee-Chin,, , is a Jamaican-Canadian billionaire businessman, and philanthropist and the chairman and CEO of Portland Holdings Inc, a privately held investment company in Ontario, Canada.
Market timing is the strategy of making buying or selling decisions of financial assets by attempting to predict future market price movements. The prediction may be based on an outlook of market or economic conditions resulting from technical or fundamental analysis. This is an investment strategy based on the outlook for an aggregate market rather than for a particular financial asset.
John Clifton "Jack" Bogle was an American investor, business magnate, and philanthropist. He was the founder and chief executive of The Vanguard Group, and is credited with creating the first index fund. An avid investor and money manager himself, he preached investment over speculation, long-term patience over short-term action, and reducing broker fees as much as possible. The ideal investment vehicle for Bogle was a low-cost index fund held over a period of a lifetime with dividends reinvested and purchased with dollar cost averaging.
Active management refers to a portfolio management strategy where the manager makes specific investments with the goal of outperforming an investment benchmark index or target return. In passive management, investors expect a return that closely replicates the investment weighting and returns of a benchmark index and will often invest in an index fund.
The SPDR S&P 500 is an exchange-traded fund from State Street Global Advisors that tracks the S&P 500. For a long time, the fund was the largest ETF in the world. As of August 2012, it is the largest exchange-traded product in the world, and also the most actively traded.
Dodge & Cox is an American mutual fund company, founded in 1930 by Van Duyn Dodge and E. Morris Cox, that provides professional investment management services.
James Patrick O'Shaughnessy is an American investor and the founder, Chairman, and Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, LLC (OSAM), an asset management firm headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut.
Ione Glorianne Felice Stromberg is a Canadian securities lawyer, former commissioner of the Ontario Securities Commission, and author of numerous reports, papers and other articles on securities regulation reform in Canada. She is also a frequent media commentator, and public speaker, and has advised retail investors to "streetproof" themselves in their dealings with the financial services industry.
PTI Securities & Futures is a money management, securities and discount brokerage firm with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Peoria, Arizona. Established in 1991, PTI Securities provides investors, fund managers and pension funds in the United States with investment consulting services.
Fullerton Securities and Wealth Advisors Limited is a company headquartered in Gurgaon, India. It offers financial planning and wealth management products to mass affluent and affluent customer segments.
Jean-Marie Eveillard is a French international investor who currently serves as the senior investment adviser to First Eagle Funds. Eveillard, who served more than a quarter century as a portfolio manager, was co-honored in 2001 by Morningstar, Inc. as "Stock Manager of the Year" and was a finalist for their 2009 "fund manager of the decade award for non-U.S. stocks". In 2003, the group gave him a "Fund Manager Lifetime Achievement" award.
FundsIndia is an online investment website headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The website is owned by Wealth India Financial Services Pvt. Ltd. It was initially created just for mutual funds but later introduced other investment products like stocks, corporate fixed deposits, bonds, and more. FundsIndia was founded by C.R. Chandrasekar and Srikanth Meenakshi, alumnus of the University of Hyderabad.
Paul Schott Stevens is an American attorney serving as the president of Investment Company Institute. He served on the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan.
