Talk:Extended market index fund

Reader feedback: The page link that supposedl...
155.56.68.218 posted this comment on 6 January 2015 (view all feedback).

"The page link that supposedly shows benchmark statistics from Vanguard for the 500 / 4500 mix hasn't been updated since 2012. Can you find a more current link?"

This is the link: Vanguard - Key Benchmark Statistics, I can't find anything more recent at Vanguard. The difficulty is to find the ratio of the S&P to Wilshire 4500 completion indexes. Finding individual indexes is easy straightforward, the ratio is more elusive. Or, is it simply taking the ratio of the market caps?
 * Wilshire 4500 Completion Index, $1.6 billion as-of September 30, 2014.
 * S&P 500®, $38,449.63 million (mean) as-of December 31, 2014.

The dates differ by a few months and I'm not sure of which market cap property to use (mean, full, adjusted, etc.). The numbers don't align with an 80/20 ratio, so I don't think I'm doing this right. LadyGeek 18:55, 7 January 2015 (CST)

Forum member feedback
In Re: Suggestions for the Wiki, new member rwscid has a question which I can't answer.

Very new to this, please be patient if I am in the wrong place doing the wrong thing.

On this page Extended market index fund

there is a (working) link which leads to a page which does not deliver the promised information. Or perhaps I just don't know how to read the link, do the math, think, etc.

The sentence reads:

"One convenient source for the proper current percentage composition is Vanguard's benchmark statistics."

The link provides only historical returns. If someone could substitute a link that does what it says it should do, or set my thinking straight, it would be greatly appreciated, for balancing my portfolio of index funds to the 'proper current percentage' is precisely what I am attempting to do.

Thx in advance!

As shown in the prior reader feedback (above), I also don't understand how the benchmark returns relate to percentage composition. Would this be better addressed by using Morningstar Instant X-Ray instead?

--LadyGeek 20:58, 2 June 2016 (EDT)

On this article's Discussion page, there's one Reader feedback and one Forum member feedback, both about the same subject: how to get latest percentage of S&P 500 and S&P Extended Market to get Total Market.

Here's one method using data from S&P's site.
 * 1) Browse to the S&P pages https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-total-market-index-tmi. Click on the "Characteristics" tab and multiply the Number of Constituents and Mean Market Cap numbers to get the Total Index market cap.
 * 2) Repeat above step for https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-completion-index-ci. Divide the Completion Index's market cap by the Total Index market cap to get the percent needed for the Extended market index fund.

The 500's market cap can be computed as a difference between Total and Extended. Or repeat above step for https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-500

The above web pages appear to be kept up-to-date (last date given is "As of Jan 31, 2020")

Suggested changes for this wiki article:
 * 1) Add the above method to the Approximating_total_stock_market wiki article.
 * 2) Replace this wiki article's sentence "One convenient source for the proper current percentage composition is Vanguard's benchmark comparison".  This link is out-of-date.  I'd replace the sentence with "One source for the proper current percentage composition is https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Approximating_total_stock_market."  In my opinion, that other wiki article is the best place for understanding how to approximate total stock market regardless of which components you're using.  I think it's okay to leave this article's suggested 80/20 proportion as-is.  Close enough is good enough.

Comments?

--Sycamore 16:27, 22 February 2020 (UTC)