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Why is the price of my investment only updated once per day?
I strongly suggest you go to www.investor.gov as it has excellent information regarding these types of questions. A mutual fund is a company that pools money from many investors and invests the money in securities such as stocks, bonds, and short-term debt. The combined holdings of the mutual fund are known as its portfolio. Investors buy shares in mutual funds. Each share represents an investor’s part ownership in the fund and the income it generates. When you buy shares of a mutual fund you're buying it at NAV, or net asset value.  The NAV is the value of the fund’s assets minus its liabilities. SEC rules require funds to calculate the NAV at least once daily. Different funds may own thousands of different stocks.  In order to calculate the NAV, the fund company must value every security it owns.  Since each security's valuation is changing throughout the day it's difficult to determine the valuation of the mutual fund except for when the market is closed.  Once the market has closed (4pm eastern) and securities are no longer trading, the company must get accurate valuations for every security and perform the valuation calculations and distribute the results to the pricing vendors.  This has to be done by 6pm eastern.  This is a difficult and, more importantly, a time consuming process to get it done right once per day.  Having worked for several fund companies I can tell you there are many days where companies are getting this done at the very last minute. When you place a buy or sell order for a mutual fund it doesn't matter what time you placed it as long as you entered it before 4pm ET.  Cutoff times may be earlier depending on who you're placing the order with.  If companies had to price their funds more frequently, they would undoubtedly raise their fees.