Is CLM a stock or an ETF?
CLM is a Closed End Fund. It is a collection of other securities that trades as if it were stock issued by a single company. NASDAQ cares about how it trades, so that would be why they list it as you say they do.  Here is a list of their top 25 holdings: http://portfolios.morningstar.com/fund/holdings?t=CLM&region=usa&culture=en-US "Ask your trading site for their definition of ""ETF"". The term itself is overloaded/ambiguous. Consider: If ""ETF"" is interpreted liberally, then any fund that trades on a [stock] exchange is an exchange-traded fund. i.e. the most literal meaning implied by the acronym itself. Whereas, if ""ETF"" is interpreted more narrowly and in the sense that most market participants might use it, then ""ETF"" refers to those exchange-traded funds that specifically have a mechanism in place to ensure the fund's current price remains close to its net asset value. This is not the case with closed-end funds (CEFs), which often trade at either a premium or a discount to their underlying net asset value." I find the reg, at last. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=Cornerstone+Strategic+Value+Fund&owner=exclude&action=getcompany Yes, its a common stock. Cornerstone Strategic Value Fund, Inc. is a diversified, closed-end management investment company. It was incorporated in Maryland on May 1, 1987 and commenced investment operations on June 30, 1987. The Fund’s shares of Common Stock are traded on the NYSE MKT under the ticker symbol “CLM.”[1] That essentially means that CLM is a company all of whose assets are held as tradable financial instruments OR EQUIVALENTLY CLM is an ETF that was created as a company in its own right. That it was founded in the 80s, before the modern definition of ETFs really existed, it is probably more helpful to think of it by the first definition as the website mentions that it is traded as common stock so its stock holds more in common with stock than ETFs. [1] http://www.cornerstonestrategicvaluefund.com/
"As user quid states in his answer, all you need to do is open an account with a stock broker in order to gain access to the world's stock markets.  If you are currently banking with one of the six big bank, then they will offer stockbroking services.  You can shop around for the best commission rates.  If you wish to manage your own investments, then you will open a ""self-directed"" account.  You can shelter your investments from all taxation by opening a TFSA account with your stock broker.  Currently, you can add $5,500 per year to your TFSA.  Unused allowances from previous years can still be used.  Thus, if you have not yet made any TFSA contributions, you can add upto $46,500 to your TFSA and enjoy the benefits of tax free investing. Investing in what you are calling ""unmanaged index funds"" means investing in ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). Once you have opened your account you can invest in any ETFs traded on the stock markets accessible through your stock broker. Buying shares on foreign markets may carry higher commission rates, but for the US markets commissions are generally the same as they are for Canadian markets.  However, in the case of buying foreign shares you will carry the extra cost and risk of selling Canadian dollars and buying foreign currency.  There are also issues to do with foreign withholding taxes when you trade foreign shares directly.   In the case of the US, you will also need to register with the US tax authorities.  Foreign withholding taxes payable are generally treated as a tax credit with respect to Canadian taxation, so you will not be double taxed. In today's market, for most investors there is generally no need to invest directly in foreign market indices since you can do so indirectly on the Toronto stock market.  The large Canadian ETF providers offer a wide range of US, European, Asian, and Global ETFs as well as Canadian ETFs.  For example, you can track all of the major US indices by trading in Toronto in Canadian dollars.  The S&P500, the Dow Jones, and the NASDAQ100 are offered in both ""currency hedged"" and ""unhedged"" forms.  In addition, there are ETFs on the total US Market, US Small Caps, US sectors such as banks, and more exotic ETFs such as those offering ""covered call"" strategies and ""put write"" strategies. Here is a link to the BMO ETF website. Here is a link to the iShares (Canada) ETF website." Index Funds & ETFs, if they are tracking the same index, will be the same in an ideal world. The difference would be because of the following factors: Expense ratio: i.e. the expense the funds charge. This varies and hence it would lead to a difference in performance. Tracking error: this means that there is a small percentage of error between the actual index composition and the fund composition. This is due to various reasons.  Effectively this would result in the difference between values. Demand / Supply: with ETFs, the fund is traded on stock exchanges like a stock. If the general feeling is that the index is rising, it could lead to an increase in the price of the ETF. Index funds on the other hand would remain the same for the day and are less liquid. This results in a price increase / decrease depending on the market. The above explains the reason for the difference.   Regarding which one to buy, one would need to consider other factors like: a) How easy is it to buy ETFs? Do you already hold Demat A/C & access to brokers to help you conduct the transaction or do you need to open an additional account at some cost. b) Normally funds do not need any account, but are you OK with less liquidity as it would take more time to redeem funds. A mutual fund has several classes of shares that are charged different fees. Some shares are sold through brokers and carry a sales charge (called load) that compensates the broker in lieu of a fee that the broker would charge the client for the service.  Vanguard does not have sales charge on its funds and you don't need to go through a broker to buy its shares; you can buy directly from them.  Admiral shares of Vanguard funds are charged lower annual expenses than regular shares (yes, all mutual funds charge expenses for fund adninistration that reduce the return that you get, and Vanguard has some of the lowest expense ratios) but Admiral shares are available only for large investments, typically $50K or so.  If you have invested in a Vanguard mutual fund, your shares can be set to automatically convert to Admiral shares when the investment reaches the right level. A mutual fund manager can buy and sell stocks to achieve the objectives of the fund, so what stockes you are invested in as a share holder in a mutual fund will typically be unknown to you on a day-to-day basis.  On the other hand, Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are fixed baskets of stocks, and you can buy shares in the ETF.  These shares are bought and sold through a broker (so you pay a transaction fee each time) but expenses are lower since there is no manager to buy and sell stocks: the basket is fixed. Many ETFs follow specific market indexes (e.g. S&P 500).  Another difference between ETFs and mutual funds is that you can buy and sell ETFs at any time of the day just as if you could if you held stocks. With mutual funds, any buy and sell requests  made during the day are processed at the end of the day and the value of the shares that you buy or sell is determined by the closing price of the stocks held by the mutual fund.  With ETFs, you are getting the intra-day price at the time the buy or sell order is executed by your broker. "Bit hesitant to put this in an answer as I don't know if specific investment advice is appropriate, but this has grown way too long for a comment. The typical answer given for people who don't have the time, experience, knowledge or inclination to pick specific stocks to hold should instead invest in ETFs (exchange-traded index funds.) What these basically do is attempt to simulate a particular market or stock exchange. An S&P 500 index fund will (generally) attempt to hold shares in the stocks that make up that index. They only have to follow an index, not try to beat it so are called ""passively"" managed. They have very low expense ratios (far below 1%) and are considered a good choice for investors who want to hold stock without significant effort or expense and who's main goal is time in the market. It's a contentious topic but on average an index (and therefore an index fund) will go even with or outperform most actively managed funds. With a sufficiently long investment horizon, which you have, these may be ideal for you. Trading in ETFs is also typically cheap because they are traded like stock. There are plenty of low-fee online brokers and virtually all will allow trading in ETFs. My broker even has a list of several hundred popular ETFs that can be traded for free.  The golden rule in investing is that you should never buy into something you don't understand. Don't buy individual stock with little information: it's often little more than gambling. The same goes for trading platforms like Loyal3. Don't use them unless you know their business model and what they stand to gain from your custom. As mentioned I can trade certain funds for free with my broker, but I know why they can offer that and how they're still making money." Willis Group Holdings Set to Join the S&P 500; Fossil Group to Join S&P MidCap 400; Adeptus Health to Join S&P SmallCap 600 notes in part for the S & P case: Willis Group Holdings plc (NYSE:WSH) will replace Fossil Group Inc.   (NASD:FOSL) in the S&P 500, and Fossil Group will replace Towers   Watson & Co. (NASD:TW) in the S&P MidCap 400 after the close of   trading on Monday, January 4. Willis Group is merging with Towers   Watson in a deal expected to be completed on or about that date   pending final conditions. Post merger, Willis Group Holdings will   change its name to Willis Towers Watson plc and trade under the ticker   symbol “WLTW”. Fossil has a market capitalization that is more   representative of the midcap market space. As of Jan. 8, Fossil is about $1.44B in market cap and Willis is $21.02B for those wondering. Apple with a market cap of $540.58B is 3.26% of the index making the entire index worth approximately $16,582.21B, so Fossil is worth .00868% of the overall index for those wanting some numbers here. Thus, if a company acquires another and becomes bigger than there can be replacements made in those indices that have an artificial number of small members. Alternatively, a member may be removed for lack of representation where it is just so small compared to other companies that may be a better fit as some indices could be viewed as actively managed in a sense. In contrast, there are indices like those from Russell, known for the Russell 2000 small-cap index: Q: Why don't you reconstitute the indexes more often than once a year? A: Maintaining representative indexes must be weighed against the   costs associated with making frequent changes to index constituents   (namely, buying and selling stocks). The Russell Indexes are annually reconstituted because our research   has shown that this strikes a reasonable balance between accuracy and   cost. We originally reconstituted our indexes quarterly, then   semi-annually, but found these options to be suboptimal. Our extensive   research demonstrates that annual reconstitution accurately represents   the capitalization segments and minimizes the turnover required to   reflect the segments as they change. Thus there can be different scenarios.  Then there can be the effect on index funds when price-weighted indices like the Dow Jones Industrial Average has a member that does a stock split that causes some rebalancing too. On the DJIA Divisor: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is a price-weighted index that   is calculated by dividing the sum of the prices of the 30 component   stocks (Dow Jones Industrial Average components) by a number called   the DJIA Divisor or Dow Divisor . The index divisor is updated   periodically and adjusted to offset the effect of stock splits, bonus   issues or any change in the component stocks included in the DJIA.   This is done in order to keep the index value consistent. "IT appears the company you're talking about did not report as you expected them to, which is not unusual for OTC companies because, as Milo stated, they are not well-managed. That being said, reports on EDGAR are available as soon as they're posted.  I'm not aware of any lag between when the company uploads their report and it is available on the EDGAR site. Looking at the profile of the company you're referring to, I'm curious why you'd be so interested in a company with huge negative earnings, a near-zero share price, and an obviously spotty history of reporting its numbers.  In order to make any money with this stock, you'd have to buy a huge number of shares, which could be difficult to unload.  Further, the fees you're going to pay to make your trades are very likely to outstrip your return, so you'd be upside down on it. This company has pretty negative financials, and in a world of cheap oil, alternative energy (and the companies that deal in it) are out of vogue, so they're not likely to see a turnaround anytime soon.  They're spending money on R & D at a rate almost 17 times earnings, and the losses are deepening, while revenues are not improving all that much.  These guys are bleeding to death, and there's little prospect of a financial transfusion on the horizon. This is, as they say, a ""dog with fleas"", so your best bet is to find something else to put your money into. I hope this helps. Good luck!" I would buy an ETF (or maybe a couple) in stable, blue chip companies with a decent yield (~3%) and then I'd play a conservative covered call strategy on the stock selling a new position about once a month. That's just me. I traded futures for a brief period in school using the BrokersXpress platform (now part of OptionsXpress, which is in turn now part of Charles Schwab). They had a virtual trading platform, and apparently still do, and it was excellent. Since my main account was enabled for futures, this carried over to the virtual account, so I could trade a whole range of futures, options, stocks, etc. I spoke with OptionsXpress, and you don't need to fund your acount to use the virtual trading platform. However, they will cancel your account after an arbitrary period of time if you don't log in every few days. According to their customer service, there is no inactivity fee on your main account if you don't fund it and make no trades. I also used Stock-Trak for a class and despite finding the occasional bug or website performance issue, it provided a good experience. I received a discount because I used it through an educational institution, and customer service was quite good (probably for the same reason), but I don't know if those same benefits would apply to an individual signing up for it.  I signed up for top10traders about seven years ago when I was in secondary school, and it's completely free. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for, and the interface was poorly designed and slow. Furthermore, at that time, there were no restrictions that limited the number of shares you could buy to the number of outstanding shares, so you could buy as many as you could afford, even if you exceeded the number that physically existed. While this isn't an issue for large companies, it meant you could earn a killing trading highly illiquid pink sheet stocks because you could purchase billions of shares of companies with only a few thousand shares actually outstanding. I don't know if these issues have been corrected or not, but at the time, I and several other users took advantage of these oversights to rack up hundreds of trillions of dollars in a matter of days, so if you want a realistic simulation, this isn't it.  Investopedia also has a stock simulator that I've heard positive things about, although I haven't used it personally.