Is an open-sourced World Stock Index a pipe-dream?
"An index is just a mathematical calculation based on stock prices. Anyone can create such a calculation and (given a little effort) publish it based on publicly available data. The question of ""open source"" is simply whether or not the calculator chooses to publish the calculation used. Given how easy an index is to create, the issue is not the ""open source"" nature or otherwise, but its credibility and usefulness." "I think that any ETF is ""open source"" -- the company issues a prospectus and publishes the basket of stocks that make up the index. The stuff that is proprietary are trading strategies and securities or deriviatives that aren't traded on the open market. Swaps, venture funds, hedge funds and other, more ""exotic"" derivatives are the things that are closed. What do you mean by ""open source"" in this context?"
"My answer is that when confronted with the obvious, the most common human reaction is to seek reasons for it, because things have to be right. They have to have a reason. We don't like it when things suck.  So when finding out that you are being ripped off every day of your life, your reaction is ""There must be a logical reason that perfectly explain why this is. After all, the world is fair, governments are working in our best interest and if they do it this way, they must have a very good reason for it."" Sorry, but that not the case. You have the facts. You are just not looking at them. Economics, as a subject, is the proper management of resources and production. Now, forget the fancy theories, the elaborate nonsense about stocks and bonds and currencies and pay attention to the actual situation. On our planet, most people earn $2,000 per year. Clean water is not available for a very sizable percent of the world's population. Admittedly, 90% of the world's wealth is concentrated in the hands of the most wealthy 10%. A Chinese engineer earns a fraction of what a similarly qualified engineer earns in the States. Most people, even in rich countries, have a negative net value. They have mortgages that run for a third of their lifetimes, credit card debts, loans... do the balance. Most people are broke. Does this strike you as the logical result of a fair and balanced economic system?  Does this look like a random happenstance?  The dominant theory is ""It just happened, it's nobody's fault and nobody designed it that way and to think otherwise is very bad because it makes you a conspiracy theorist, and conspiracy theorists are nuts. You are not nuts are you?"" Look at the facts already in your possession. It didn't just happen.  The system is rigged. When a suit typing a few numbers in a computer can make more money in 5 minutes than an average Joe can make in 100 lifetimes of honest, productive work, you don't have a fair economic system, you have a scam machine.  When you look at a system as broken as the one we have, you shouldn't be asking yourself ""what makes this system right?"" What you should be asking yourself is more along the lines of ""Why is it broken? Who benefits? Why did congress turn its monetary policy over to the Federal reserve (a group of unelected and unaccountable individuals with strong ties in the banking industry) and does not even bother to conduct audits to know how your money is actually managed? This brilliant movie, Money as debt, points to a number of outrageous bugs in our economic system. Now, you can dream up reasons why the system should be the way it is and why it is an acceptable system. Or you can look at the fact and realize that there is NO JUSTIFICATION for an economic system that perform as badly as it does.  Back to basics. Money is supposed to represent production. It's in every basic textbook on the subject of economics. So, what should money creation be based on? Debt? No. Gold? No. Randomly printed by the government when they feel like it? No (although this could actually be better than the 2 previous suggestions) Money is supposed to represent production. Index money on production and you have a sound system. Why isn't it done that way? Why do you think that is?" Exchange-traded funds are bought and sold like stocks so you'd be able to place stop orders on them just like you could for individual stocks. For example, SPY would be the ticker for an S & P 500 ETF known as a SPDR. Open-end mutual funds don't have stop orders because of how the buying and selling is done which is on unknown prices and often in fractional shares. For example, the Vanguard 500 Index Investor shares(VFINX) would be an example of an S & P 500 tracker here. "Maybe he is now - I saw his site probably 7 years ago.  The reason I don't take the critic seriously is because it seems that he has a personal vendetta against Kiyo for whatever reason. I'm guessing he has a chip on his shoulder because he disagrees with some of Kiyo's advice, and is pissed off at how much success it brought him. As such, all of his information is extremely negatively biased. It's difficult to separate the facts from everything else. Hence, he is not a reliable source. A reliable and trustworthy source is not biased, and lays out all the facts, good and bad, so that you can create your own opinion.  I take RDPD seriously (mind you, it'd been 10+ years since I've read it) because the advice is overwhelmingly good and positive. Even if a small percentage I disagree with, overall it's still a very good book. I always say: RDPD =&gt; Millionaire Mind =&gt; Think &amp; Grow Rich + Greatest Salesman in the World (the last 2 at the same time).  I politely disagree that the ""opening the mind"" thing is overestimated, because by definition it's not something that you can overestimate. It is everything, and nothing is more important. The mind is the source of all the money, all your happiness, all your misery. Unless you first get your mind right, it will be impossible for you to become rich (barring some extremely lucky event, such as winning a lottery or getting inheritance). This is why the majority of people who win lotteries go broke - even if the money falls on your lap, unless your mind is ready for it, off it goes again! ""Opening the mind"" as you put it is really the first step - it's what makes everything else possible. So you're damn right that it's worth feeling elated about. :)" It is safe to say that you are new to the guideline of a glass bubbler? You should simply envision a bong in a littler size. Glass bubblers are made to have a stem that keeps running down the length of the murmuring chamber. This opens up into a dish that is situated notwithstanding the bubbler. These glass bubblers are unfathomably conservative in size and make it simple to smoke using only one hand. The bubbler is with the end goal that smoke could be taken in from one opening. As to auto mechanics of the bubbler go, it gets on an indistinguishable lines from a glass pipe, with the main refinement being that there are littler chambers on the inside. You can likewise search for glass smoking pipe for sale on web. Multiple overlapping indices exist covering various investment universes.  Almost all of the widely followed indices were originally created by Lehman Brothers and are now maintained by Barclays.  The broadest U.S. dollar based bond index is known as the Universal.  The Aggregate (often abbreviated Agg), which is historically the most popular index, more or less includes all bonds in the Universal rated investment grade.  The direct analog to the S&P 500 would be the U.S. Corporate Investment Grade index, which is tracked by the ETF LQD, and contains exactly what it sounds like. Citigroup (formerly Salomon Brothers) also has a competitor index to the Aggregate known as Broad Investment Grade (BIG), and Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America) has the Domestic Master. Multiple other indices also exist covering other bond markets, such as international (non-USD) bonds, tax-exempts (municipal bonds), securitized products, floating rate, etc. Perhaps someone has an investment objective different than following the market. If one is investing in stocks with an intent on getting dividend income then there may be other options that make more sense than owning the whole market. Secondly, there is Slice and Dice where one may try to find a more optimal investment idea by using a combination of indices and so one may choose to invest 25% into each of large-cap value, large-cap growth, small-cap value and small-cap growth with an intent to pick up benefits that have been seen since 1927 looking at Fama and French's work. I am a believer in that theory. My opinion is that over the long term, we can expect 25% of income to reflect the payment on one's mortgage, and if you drew a line over time reflecting the mortgage this represents plus the downpayment, you'd be very close to a median home price. The bubble that occurred was real, but not as dramatic as Schiller's chart implies. $1000 will support a $124K 30yr mortgage, but $209K at 4%. This is with no hype, and exact same supply/demand pressures.  The market cap of all US companies adds to about $18T. The total wealth in the US, about $60T. Of course US stocks aren't just held by US citizens, it's a big world.  Let me suggest two things - the world is poor in comparison to much of the US. A $100,000 net worth puts you in the top 8% in the world. The implication of this is that as the poorer 90% work their way up from poverty, money will seek investments, and there's room for growth.  Even if you looked at a closed system, the US only, the limit, absent bubbles, would be one that would have to put a cap on productivity. In today's dollars we produce more than we did years ago, and less than we will in the future. We invent new things faster than the old ones are obsoleted. So any prognostication that our $18T market can grow to say, $30T, does not need to discuss P/Es or bubbles, but rather the creation of new products and businesses that will increase the total market.  To summarize -  Population growth (not really discussed), Productivity, and long term reduced Poverty will all keep that boundary to be a growing number.  That said, this question may be economic, and not PF, in which case my analysis is bound for the Off-Topic barrel. Fascinating question. The closest I can think of from the back of my head is http://finviz.com/map.ashx, which display a nice map and allows for different intervals. It has different scopes (S&P500, ETFs, World), but does not allow for specific date ranges, though.