Afraid to Buy Stocks? Try This Instead
When you're new to investing, the idea of picking out individual stocks for your portfolio can be extremely daunting. Sure, you can read up on different companies and examine their financials, but at the end of the day, it can be tricky to predict whether a given stock is trading at a fair price, and if that stock's value will soar over time, decline, or largely remain flat.
Even if you're not a particularly new investor, selecting stocks on an individual basis can be a stressful process. If you're not confident in your ability to choose stocks, don't sweat it -- not when there's another option for building a solid portfolio.
Index funds are passively managed funds that aim to match the performance of the different benchmarks they're tied to. If the idea of choosing stocks for your portfolio doesn't sit well with you, or you're worried you'll ultimately choose poorly, then you may want to load up on index funds instead -- specifically, those that track the S&P 500, an index comprised of the 500 largest publicly traded companies.
Source Fool.com
