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Comment by southphillyman | Hacker News Reader

Timely article, I was just thinking about this last night...while browsing Vanguard's site looking for index funds to invest in. Everyone blindly putting their money into similar instruments and getting double digit gains nearly every year just seems like it can end catastrophically. I want to do more research on how these passive funds affect the overall market and vice versa.

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Aren't most of those double digit gains just from the market rebounding from the 2008 recession?

Rebound to inflated values? Reminds me of the housing market in my area now. It's "rebounded" to higher than 2008 levels on the basis of speculation and gentrified neighborhoods being hot. Seems like another bubble. I need to do more research, but I'm curious what the long term viability of these index funds are as more and more people gravitate towards them

I was thinking more, rebounded to 2008 levels + inflation?

Yes, and in particular they would indicate lower future returns for the equity market as a whole, but that has nothing to do with the issue here, namely ETF/index fund vs. non-ETF/index fund.

Stupid question but what are you looking for when browsing Vanguard? I thought all the index funds were the same, just following the index.

They have different asset classes, different minimums, different historical returns. Etc

Thanks. Another stupid question: how can two index funds have different returns? Are they following different indexes?

Yes, there are many different indexes out there.

https://etfdb.com/indexes/equity/

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