Active investing means that someone (hopefully someone who knows what they're doing) is in charge of managing the money and investments in a fund. When you buy shares in a mutual fund, for example, you're paying a fee because someone has hired theoretically smart analysts and portfolio managers who spend all day looking at stocks and bonds to make investments on your behalf.
The idea is that these managers and analysts are...active. They are using their own experience, forecasts, and research to decide which investments are best. The opposite of active investing is passive investing (duh), which is just...buying an index fund. Index funds don't have portfolio managers. What they do have are rebalancers. Might sound like Marvel villains, but they're really just finance folks who check every so often (usually quarterly) to make sure that the index still reflects what you think you bought in the first place.
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Finance: What is a Country Basket (Index...30 Views
Finance, a la shmoop. What is a country basket index fund?
All right we're picking daisies, marigolds, lilies so uh how do we [Pictures of flowers]
rephrase in Italian? Like, we want to fill a portfolio basket with just stocks [Pouring a glass of red wine]
representing the overall financial health of Italy. Is Italy healthy? While
they smoke a lot they drink a lot of wine they eat a bunch of pasta but there
always seems to be a woman from some small village who's celebrating her [Old woman at a birthday party]
117th birthday over there. Well a country basket is just an index fund of
stocks representing a country. Like we're doing Korea... South we're gonna have
in that basket dunno some Samsung, a load of Daewoo, a hunk of Hyundai and some [Company stocks being added to the basket]
nice barbecue on the side. That'd be our Korean country basket and it's a good
basket to fill if you're just bullish on a country but not really sure which
flower on which to place your bets. It's like instead of trying to decide between [The stocks in the basket turn into flowers]
roulette or poker or slots... Well you just buy stock in Las Vegas
Sands you know you bet on the entire casino, and bueno Fortuna you know good [Someone checking their cards in a casino]
luck there pal, doesn't the house always win? Yeah so why do people keep going there?...
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