Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.
For the taxable investor, indexing means never having to say you're sorry.
The key aspect of an index fund is that many of them, not all of them, but many of them are extremely cheap.
If your broker or investment advisor is not familiar with the concept of standard deviation of returns, get a new one.
An index fund is a fund that simply invests in all of the stocks in a market. So, for example, an index fund might invest in every single stock or almost every single stock in the U.S. market, it might invest in every single stock abroad, or it might invest in all of the bonds that are out there. And you can make a perfectly fine investing portfolio that mixes equal parts of all three of those.
The essence of effective portfolio construction is the use of a large number of poorly correlated assets.
