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Is there any benefit to investing in an index fund?
Beatrice does a good job of summarizing things.  Tracking the index yourself is expensive (transaction costs) and tedious (number of transactions, keeping up with the changes, etc.)  One of the points of using an index fund is to reduce your workload.  Diversification is another point, though that depends on the indexes that you decide to use.  That said, even with a relatively narrow index you diversify in that segment of the market. A point I'd like to add is that the management which occurs for an index fund is not exactly "active."  The decisions on which stocks to select are already made by the maintainers of the index.  Thus, the only management that has to occur involves the trades required to mimic the index.