P/E (or similar) for index funds?
"ycharts.com has ""Weighted Average PE Ratio"" and a bunch of other metrics that are meant to correspond to well known stock metrics.  Other websites will have similar ratios." The S&P 500 is a market index.  The P/E data you're finding for the S&P 500 is data based on the constituent list of that market index and isn't necessarily the P/E ratio of a given fund, even one that aims to track the performance of the S&P 500.    I'm sure similar metrics exist for other market indexes, but unless Vanguard is publishing it's specific holdings in it's target date funds there's no market index to look at.
"If you want a Do-It-Yourself solution, look to a Vanguard account with their total market index funds.   There's a lot of research that's been done recently in the financial independence community.  Basically, there's not many money managers who can outperform the market index (either S&P 500 or a total market index).  Actually, no mutual funds have been identified that outperform the market, after fees, consistently.  So there's not much sense in paying someone to earn you less than a low fee index fund could do.  And some of the numbers show that you can actually lose value on your 401k due to high fees. That's where Vanguard comes in.  They offer some of the lowest fees (if not the lowest) and a selection of index funds that will let you balance your portfolio the way you want.  Whether you want to go 100% total stock market index fund or a balance between total stock market index fund and total bond index fund, or a ""lazy 3 fund portfolio"", Vanguard gives you the tools to do it yourself.  Rebalancing would require about an hour every quarter. (Or time span you declare yourself). jlcollinsnh A Simple Path to Wealth is my favorite blog about financial independence.  Also, Warren Buffet recommended that the trustees for his wife's inheritance when he passes invest her trust in one investment.  Vanguard's S&P500 index fund.  The same fund he chose in a 10 year $1M bet vs. hedge fund managers.  (proceeds go to charity).  That was about 9 years ago.  So far, Buffet's S&P500 is beating the hedge funds.  Investopedia Article" Your investment is probably in a Collective Investment Trust. These are not mutual funds, and are not publicly traded. I.e. they are private to plan participants in your company. Because of this, they are not required* to distribute dividends like mutual funds. Instead, they will reinvest dividends automatically, increasing the value of the fund, rather than number of shares, as with dividend reinvestment. Sine you mention the S&P 500 fund you have tracks closely to the S&P Index, keep in mind there's two indexes you could be looking at: Without any new contributions, your fund should closely track the Total Return version for periods 3 months or longer, minus the expense ratio. If you are adding contributions to the fund, you can't just look at the start and end balances. The comparison is trickier and you'll need to use the Internal Rate of Return (look into the XIRR function in Excel/Google Sheets). *MFs are not strictly required to pay dividends, but are strongly tax-incentivized to do so, and essentially all do. "I actually love this question, and have hashed this out with a friend of mine where my premise was that at some volume of money it must be advantageous to simply track the index yourself. There some obvious touch-points: Most people don't have anywhere near the volume of money required for even a $5 commission outweigh the large index fund expense ratios. There are logistical issues that are massively reduced by holding a fund when it comes to winding down your investment(s) as you get near retirement age. Index funds are not touted as categorically ""the best"" investment, they are being touted as the best place for the average person to invest. There is still a management component to an index like the S&P500.  The index doesn't simply buy a share of Apple and watch it over time.  The S&P 500 isn't simply a single share of each of the 500 larges US companies it's market cap weighted with frequent rebalancing and constituent changes.  VOO makes a lot of trades every day to track the S&P index, ""passive index investing"" is almost an oxymoron. The most obvious part of this is that if index funds were ""the best"" way to invest money Berkshire Hathaway would be 100% invested in VOO.  The argument for ""passive index investing"" is simplified for public consumption.  The reality is that over time large actively managed funds have under-performed the large index funds net of fees.  In part, the thrust of the advice is that the average person is, or should be, more concerned with their own endeavors than they are managing their savings.  Investment professionals generally want to avoid ""How come I my money only returned 4% when the market index returned 7%?  If you track the index, you won't do worse than the index; this helps people sleep better at night. In my opinion the dirty little secret of index funds is that they are able to charge so much less because they spend $0 making investment decisions and $0 on researching the quality of the securities they hold.  They simply track an index; XYZ company is 0.07% of the index, then the fund carries 0.07% of XYZ even if the manager thinks something shady is going on there. The argument for a majority of your funds residing in Mutual Funds/ETFs is simple, When you're of retirement age do you really want to make decisions like should I sell a share of Amazon or a share of Exxon?  Wouldn't you rather just sell 2 units of SRQ Index fund and completely maintain your investment diversification and not pay commission?  For this simplicity you give up three basis points?  It seems pretty reasonable to me." In general, the goal of an S&P 500 index fund is to replicate the performance of the S&P 500 Index.  To do this, the fund will buy the same stocks in the same proportions as the weighting of the Index. The S&P 500 Index is free-float capitalization weighted.  This means that the higher capitalization stocks (based on publicly traded shares only) are more heavily weighted and factor into the Index value more heavily than the smaller capitalization stocks, or the stocks that have a smaller publicly traded value.  For example, companies like Apple, ExxonMobil, and Microsoft have a much larger weight in the index value than smaller companies. Alternatively, there are some S&P index funds that are equal-weighted.  In these funds, the managers have chosen to purchase all 500 of the stocks in the index, but in equal proportions instead of the weighted proportions of the index.  These equal-weighted funds will not as closely match the index price as the traditionally weighted index funds.  Instead, they might do better or worse than the index, depending on how the individual stocks do. You'll need to look at the prospectus of the index funds you are interested in to see which approach the fund is taking. Look into commodities futures & options. Unfortunately, they are not trivial instruments. This is Rob Bennett, the fellow who developed the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy and the fellow who is discussed in the comment above. The facts stated in that comment are accurate -- I went to a zero stock allocation in the Summer of 1996 because of my belief in Robert Shiller's research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. The conclusion stated, that I have said that I do not myself follow the strategy, is of course silly. If I believe in it, why wouldn't I follow it? It's true that this is a long-term strategy. That's by design. I see that as a benefit, not a bad thing. It's certainly true that VII presumes that the Efficient Market Theory is invalid. If I thought that the market were efficient, I would endorse Buy-and-Hold. All of the conventional investing advice of recent decades follows logically from a belief in the Efficient Market Theory. The only problem I have with that advice is that Shiller's research discredits the Efficient Market Theory. There is no one stock allocation that everyone following a VII strategy should adopt any more than there is any one stock allocation that everyone following a Buy-and-Hold strategy should adopt. My personal circumstances have called for a zero stock allocation. But I generally recommend that the typical middle-class investor go with a 20 percent stock allocation even at times when stock prices are insanely high. You have to make adjustments for your personal financial circumstances. It is certainly fair to say that it is strange that stock prices have remained insanely high for so long. What people are missing is that we have never before had claims that Buy-and-Hold strategies are supported by academic research. Those claims caused the biggest bull market in history and it will take some time for the widespread belief in such claims to diminish. We are in the process of seeing that happen today.  The good news is that, once there is a consensus that Buy-and-Hold can never work, we will likely have the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history. The power of academic research has been used to support Buy-and-Hold for decades now because of the widespread belief that the market is efficient. Turn that around and investors will possess a stronger belief in the need to practice long-term market timing than they have ever possessed before. In that sort of environment, both bull markets and bear markets become logical impossibilities. Emotional extremes in one direction beget emotional extremes in the other direction. The stock market has been more emotional in the past 16 years than it has ever been in any earlier time (this is evidenced by the wild P/E10 numbers that have applied for that entire time-period). Now that we are seeing the losses that follow from investing in highly emotional ways, we may see rational strategies becoming exceptionally popular for an exceptionally long period of time. I certainly hope so! The comment above that this will not work for individual stocks is correct. This works only for those investing in indexes. The academic research shows that there has never yet in 140 years of data been a time when Valuation-Informed Indexing has not provided far higher long-term returns at greatly diminished risk. But VII is not a strategy designed for stock pickers. There is no reason to believe that it would work for stock pickers. Thanks much for giving this new investing strategy some thought and consideration and for inviting comments that help investors to understand both points of view about it. Rob $500 per package, with a package representing 100 stocks, or $5k for the entire market from a single source (NYSE, for example).  IIRC that was the neighborhood when I went looking. I actually only needed one index in great detail - I chose the S&amp;P 500, and found a source for well under $100. One thing to keep in mind when calculating P/E on an index is that the E (earnings) can be very close to zero.  For example, if you had a stock trading at $100 and the earnings per share was $.01, this would result in a P/E of 10,000, which would dominate the P/E you calculate for the index.  Of course negative earnings also skew results. One way to get around this would be to calculate the average price of the index and the earnings per share of the index separately, and then divide the average price of the index by the average earnings per share of the index. Different sources calculate these numbers in different ways.  Some throw out negative P/Es (or earnings per share) and some don't.  Some calculate the price and earnings per share separate and some don't, etc... You'll need to understand how they are calculating the number in order to compare it to PEs of individual companies.