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Top 100 Independent RIAs 2024
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IFA Index Portfolios

Index Portfolio 100 S1B1
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Index Portfolio 95 S1B1
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Index Portfolio 90 S1B1
Highly Aggressive

Index Portfolio 85 S1B1
Aggressive

Index Portfolio 80 S1B1
Aggressive

Index Portfolio 75 S1B1
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Index Portfolio 70 S1B1
Moderately Aggressive

Index Portfolio 65 S1B1
Moderately Aggressive

Index Portfolio 60 S1B1
Moderately Aggressive

Index Portfolio 55 S1B1
Moderately Aggressive

Index Portfolio 50 S1B1
Moderate

Index Portfolio 45 S1B1
Moderately Conservative

Index Portfolio 40 S1B1
Moderately Conservative

Index Portfolio 35 S1B1
Moderately Conservative

Index Portfolio 30 S1B1
Moderately Conservative

Index Portfolio 25 S1B1
Conservative

Index Portfolio 20 S1B1
Conservative

Index Portfolio 15 S1B1
Conservative

Index Portfolio 10 S1B1
Highly Conservative

Index Portfolio 5 S1B1
Most Conservative
Pioneers of Probability

Pioneers of Probability: Simeon Denis Poisson
In the Prussian army in the late nineteenth century, soldiers were occasionally killed by horse kicks — rare, but across a large army over many years, it happened with a certain regularity.

Pioneers of Probability: Carl Friedrich Gauss
In the last episode, Legendre gave science its most powerful practical tool for fitting models to noisy data. He showed how to find the line — the function — that minimizes the sum of squared errors. He proved it worked. But he did not fully explain why it was the right method rather than simply a convenient one.

Pioneers of Probability: Adrien-Marie Legendre
It is 1801. In Palermo, Sicily. The astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi has spotted something new — a faint point of light moving against the stars.

Pioneers of Probability: Pierre-Simon Laplace
By the end of the eighteenth century, probability theory had accumulated a remarkable collection of results.

Pioneers of Probability: Thomas Bayes
Imagine you visit a doctor. She runs a test for a rare disease, one that affects one person in a thousand.

Pioneers of Probability: Daniel Bernoulli
Here is a game. We flip a fair coin, repeatedly, until it lands tails. If tails appears on the first flip, you win two dollars.

Pioneers of Probability: Abraham De Moivre
It’s London, 1733. Picture one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation — a personal friend of Isaac Newton.

Pioneers of Probability: Jacob Bernoulli
Flip a coin. Heads or tails? You know going in that the odds of heads is one in two.

Pioneers of Probability: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
You already know two things about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, born in Germany in 1646 — even if you don't know you know them.

Pioneers of Probability: Christiaan Huygens
By 1655, word had spread through the mathematical circles of Paris that something remarkable had happened the previous summer.

Pioneers of Probability: Blaise Pascal
If a game is interrupted halfway through, how do you fairly split the pot? Okay, we asked that in the last episode, but bear with me…

Pioneers of Probability: Pierre de Fermat
It’s the summer of 1654. Two mathematicians in France are exchanging letters about a gambling problem.

Pioneers of Probability: Galileo Galilei
It's Florence, around 1620. The grand duke's courtiers are arguing — again — about dice

Pioneers of Probability: Girolamo Cardano
It's 1550, and a physician in Milan has a problem. He's brilliant — one of the most famous doctors in Europe. He's also broke.

Pioneers of Probability: Leonardo Fibonacci
It's the year 1200. You're a merchant in Pisa, one of the busiest ports in the Mediterranean.
The Academic Papers that Changed Investing

False Discoveries in Mutual Fund Performance
It's 2010. The US economy is clawing back from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Affordable Care Act reshapes American healthcare, and Apple launches the iPad.

Value vs Growth: The International Evidence
It's 1998. The Clinton impeachment proceedings grip Washington, the European Central Bank is established and eleven nations are selected to adopt the Euro as their single currency, and two Stanford PhD students launch a search engine called Google.

The Case for an Unmanaged Investment Company
It's 1960. JFK is on the campaign trail, NASA launches America's first weather satellite, and ABC premieres The Flintstones — the first animated series created specifically for prime-time tv.

Market Timing Ability in Investment Newsletters
It's 1994. Nelson Mandela becomes South Africa's first democratically elected president. A former Wall Street trader named Jeff Bezos founds an online bookshop called Amazon. And Forrest Gump is packing theaters across America.

Determinants of Portfolio Performance
It's 1986. The Space Shuttle Challenger is lost, Halley's Comet returns for the first time in 76 years, and Top Gun is breaking box-office records across America.

The Capital Asset Pricing Model
It's 1964. The Vietnam War is Escalating. The Civil Rights Act becomes law. And Beatlemania is sweeping America. Meanwhile, Wall Street is booming.

The Adjustment of Stock Prices to New Information
It's 1969. Wall Street traders believe they can outsmart the market by reacting faster to news than anyone else.

Hiring & Firing Investment Managers
You're running a pension fund. Thousands of retirees are counting on you to grow their savings. So you do what everyone does — you hire fund managers with the best recent track records.

Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation
It's 1976. An investor asks a simple question: How have stocks actually performed compared to bonds over the long term? Nobody knew.

Anticipated Prices and Random Fluctuation
It's 1965. Computers fill entire rooms. On Wall Street, armies of analysts pore over balance sheets, earnings reports, and economic data.

The Arithmetic of Active Management
December 1990. William Sharpe receives the Nobel Prize in Economics at Stockholm City Hall.

The Behavior of Stock Market Prices
Walk into any Wall Street brokerage in 1965, and you'll see the same thing: analysts hunched over charts, tracing patterns with their fingers.

Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth
It's the late 90's. The internet is transforming everything, including how Americans invest.

The Cross Section of Expected Returns
For nearly 30 years, finance had one answer to every question about risk: beta. Market exposure. That single number supposedly explained why some stocks delivered higher returns than others.

Prospect Theory
It's 1979. Finance has a comfortable certainty: investors are rational creatures who calculate risk, weigh probabilities, and choose whatever maximizes their utility.

Portfolio Selection
In 1952, investing advice boiled down to one thing: pick winning stocks. Find the next big company, put your money in, hope it soars
Videos

Pioneers of Probability: Simeon Denis Poisson

Tune Out the Noise - Documentary Film

Index Funds: The Movie - 2024 Version

Market Declines and Volatility

Why It's Not Different This Time

Determining a Safe Withdrawal Rate

An Interview with Mark Hebner

What Makes IFA Different?

The IFA Story

Index Funds: The 12 Steps Video Summary

The Book that Changed My Life

25 Years of IFA with David Booth

Dimensional Fund Advisors Turns 40

Efficient Market Hypothesis Explanation
Charts
Articles
Investor Education

Introduction

Step 1: Active Investors

Step 2: Nobel Laureates

Step 3: Stock Pickers

Step 4: Time Pickers

Step 5: Manager Pickers

Step 6: Style Drifters

Step 7: Silent Partners

Step 8: Riskese

Step 9: History

Step 10: Risk Capacity

Step 11: Risk Exposure

Step 12: Invest and Relax

Appendix
Store
Learn About an Evidence-Based Approach to Investing

Illustrated

Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future by IFA Wealth Advisor Mark J. Higgins

Participation in a book contest typically requires an entrance fee. This fee is intended to cover administrative expenses and is not material in amount. Referenced 'Praise' for previous editions of the book “Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors” is on file. It is not intended to be an endorsement or testimonial for Mark Hebner, Index Fund Advisors, Inc. (IFA), or it advisory services. 2023 New England Book Festival Winner: Business Book category. Awarded 12/20/2023. 2024 Southern California Book Festival Winner: Business/Technology. Awarded 12/21/2023. 2024 Nonfiction Authors Association Nonfiction Book Award Winner. Awarded 02/07/2024. 2024 Book Excellence Award Winner in Finance Category Awarded on 03/05/2024. 2024 Los Angeles Book Festival Winner: Best Business Book Awarded 4/18/2024. 2024 Goody Business Book Award Winner: Money/Personal Finance Book category. Awarded 11/15/2024.
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What are Index Funds?
IFA defines index funds as mutual or exchange-traded funds that follow a set of rules of ownership which, under normal circumstances, are held constant.
The SEC categorizes index funds as NIF or TIF:



























