What is Passive Investing?

Passive investing refers to the long-term strategy of investment to increases the returns at its maximum level by reducing the process of buying and selling. In other words, we can say that passive investing is a long-term investment strategy through which an investor buys and holds the portfolio of assets in a long time. Investment in index (index investing) is one of common passive investing strategy through which an investor buys a representative benchmark and holds it in long term period; a representative benchmark can be the S&P 500 index etc.

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Understanding Passive Investing

Passive investing can be defined as the investment strategy through which investors make investment for a long time.  It used by the investor to avoid the fees and charges; restricted performance that may happen due to frequent trading. With passive trading investors avoid the frequent buying and selling of financial commodities such as stocks. It is used with the motive of enhancing the wealth of an investor. Passive investing is also termed as a buy-and-hold strategy that means purchasing a security with the aim of owing and holding it in long term. Passive investors do not looking for profit through short term changes of market price, investor seek for the returns over long time horizon.

Passive investors believe that it might be difficult to predict the market, so investors try to meet market or performance of sector. Through passive investing investor invests in securities such as index funds, exchange-traded funds and own it for long term. For a successful investing, investors have to maintain diversified portfolio for their investment, and passive investing is one of the good ways to get diversification.

Index funds are one of the best options for passive investing, it spreads the related risk, or a representative of the target benchmarks of a securities. Investors use passive investing to avoid higher fees and operating expenses. Passive investing is one of the simplest ways of investing in the securities.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the features of Passive Investing?

The features of passive investing include the following:

• Optimistic outlook: Passive investing strategies core principal is that an investor can have insight on the stock market whether a market is going up over the long term horizon. By having access in the market an investor invests in a diversified portfolio.
• Low costs: Passive investing strategies involve low cost and reduce addition operating charges as investor invest in securities and holds it in the long term. Unlike active investors, passive investing strategy is not used to seek profit in short term through the fluctuations of price of market. In passive investing transaction cost is very low.
• Diversified holdings: Passive investing strategies also essentially offer investors with a less expensive and efficient way to diversification. Index funds allocate risk through holding a huge range of securities from their target benchmarks.
• Less risk: Passive investing strategy is less risky as it offers diversification. Diversification reduces the risk of an investment based on the investor’s choice of funds. An investor can diversify its investment in different sectors and asset classes with additional targeted index funds.

What are the disadvantages of Passive Investing?

Talking about the disadvantages of passive investing, an investor believes that a passive investing is concern to total market risk. Index funds records the overall market of stock, so whenever the bonds or entire stock market falls, index funds also get affected. Some of the disadvantages of passive investing are:

• Depends on benchmark: Index funds ensue their targeted benchmark index nonetheless of the situation of the markets.
• Translation: Passive investing rises when an index performs well in market. Investors prefer to ignore passive investing when the prices fall in the market.
• Lack of flexibility: In passive investing, flexibility of investment is not available, even if an investor predicts the bad performance of its benchmark in near future. The investor is not able to take a step of cutting its holding or owned shares or investing in other securities.
• Less pain but less gain: Passive investing strategy includes the purchasing the security and holding it for a long term (more than a year or two). Passive investing is generally based on the fact that “less pain and less gain”.