Dan Malone

They measure how well they perform versus just the market as a whole.

And over the long term, consistently, the active professionals cannot outperform the index.

So what I always say is, if the investing professionals with all the resources

All the information, all the time in the world who are being paid to do it, if they cannot do it over the long term, what chance do we have?

You know what I mean?

So this is why things like long-term investing in ETFs and index fund investing, it's not just like a good way to invest, it is the way to invest for the average person.

And so...

I think a lot of the complexity and fear and feelings of being overwhelmed with investing platforms can be mitigated and reduced by just accepting that, hey, can I just use this to automate recurring investments into low cost ETFs for 20 or 30 years?

When you break it down, that's all you have to do.

All of those flashing numbers and ups and downs and daily stock gains is irrelevant because you don't care.

Okay.

Yeah, I think that's also a good opportunity to go back to the life wrap products of the life companies as well, because we're onto the product side of things now rather than the platforms.

An exchange traded fund is essentially just a company who buys shares in other companies.

So the most popular example...

are S&P 500 funds.

So what the S&P 500 is by itself, it's a stock market index.

And an index can just be thought of as a measuring tool to assess how their performance is.

Stock market is a huge place.

There's thousands and thousands of different companies.

So if we tried to manually figure out how each segment would do, it would take us a long, long, long time.