What You Get When You Subscribe to The Index Investor?

Each month, we electronically publish The Index Investor. We alert you by email when a new issue is up on our website. You can either read each issue online, or download a pdf version of our journal for easy printing.

Each monthly edition of The Index Investor contains the following:

A summary of year to date returns on different asset classes (e.g., bonds, equities, commercial property, and commodities) in each of eight currency regions (including Australian, Canadian, and U.S. Dollars, Euro, Yen, Pounds Sterling, Swiss Franc and Indian Rupee);
Asset class valuation updates for each of these eight currency regions, including updated results for basic asset class rotation strategies;
Letters to the editor;
Two feature articles, one of which is usually on some aspect of asset allocation (e.g., economic outlook and future asset class returns, asset location and tax efficiency, how often to rebalance, etc.), and the other on the debate between indexing and active investment management (e.g., comparisons of different indexes, reviews of new funds, etc.); and
Year-to-date performance for our model portfolios.

Our model portfolios are based on the assumption that an investor knows the long term compound real (after inflation) rate of return he or she must earn on his or her portfolio over twenty years to achieve his or her financial goals. The objective of these portfolios is to maximize the probability of achieving this long-term real return target while taking on as little risk as possible. We believe that this is the situation faced by many individual investors. The target real rates of return we use for these model portfolios are 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 6% and 7%. We provide materials and tools on our site to help people determine the target real return they need to earn to achieve their goals. Our target return portfolios come in two flavors, as it were; the only difference between them is that the first set does not include the possibility of investing in hedge funds, while the latter includes a hedge fund index as a possible investment. Finally, we also include the results for a portfolio that equally weights all the asset classes we use. We believe this is the most intellectually honest benchmark against which to measure our model portfolios' performance.

Different sets of model portfolios are available for investors whose functional currencies include Australian, Canadian, and U.S. Dollars, Euro, Yen, U.K. Pounds, Swiss Francs and Indian Rupees. We also include lists of index products (mutual funds and exchange traded funds) which can be used to implement our model portfolios' asset allocations.

People sometimes also ask whether most of our articles are for readers from the United States (obviously, our model portfolios are not). Our editor lived for many years outside the U.S. (in South America, Europe, Tokyo, and Calgary. And just to make things more interesting, his roommate for part of that time was Australian...). He strives to ensure that our articles draw from a wide range of international sources, and are of interest to subscribers from all eight of the currency regions we cover. That being said, there are a few areas where the content is region specific; for these we try to run-region specific versions of our feature articles.

In addition to our monthly features, subscribers have access to all our back issues since 1997. To facilitate self-study, we also provide on our site collections of articles we have published on specific topics.

All in all, it's quite a value, brought to you for only $29.50 for six monthly issues or U.S. $59 per year. Compare that to what you paid last year in commissions, sales loads and management fees on your actively managed investments. When we say our goal is to give subscribers superior value for their time and money, we're not kidding. We hope you'll join us today.

We also provide in the next section What Others Say About The Index Investor.

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