The Financial Times Guide to Selecting Shares that Perform, 5th Edition

2

Should you try to out-perform the market?

What topics are covered in this chapter?

• You could always track the market
• The do-it-yourself way to track an index
• Which index?
• Ways to make DIY index-tracking simpler and cheaper
• Is index-tracking for wimps?
• Seek super-performance, but …

You could always track the market

Given the excellent long-term returns from the stock market, even after the crash of 2008, you could simply decide that you are not going to try to beat the market, simply to equal it. This is a relatively low-risk strategy, provided you do not splurge a large lump sum at the top of the market (see the cautions in Chapter 1) and easy to arrange.

There are two ways. The easier is to invest your money in a ‘tracker fund’ run ...