About Index Funds Advisors, Inc.

Corporate Headquarters, Irvine CA |
Index Funds Advisors, Inc. Toll Free: 1-888-643-3133 |
Index Funds Advisors, Inc. (IFA) is a fee-only
Independent Financial Advisor (ifa), registered with the United States Securities
and Exchange Commission. IFA incorporated on March 5, 1999.
Index Funds Advisors (IFA) is a fee-only independent
financial advisor that provides wealth management by utilizing risk-appropriate,
returns-optimized, and tax-managed portfolios of index funds. IFA founder,
Mark Hebner and the team at IFA have done extensive research as shown on this
web site and the #1
ranked book on index funds. This research leads our clients to the optimal
money management strategy, net of our advisory fees and
taxes. IFA completely avoids the futile, speculative, and unnecessary cost-generating
activities of stock, time, manager,
and style picking. Instead,
our investment strategy employs a disciplined, quantitative approach, emphasizing
broad diversification and consistent exposure to the structural trends of publicly
traded markets around the world, with an overweighting of small and value priced
companies. In short, we invest in capitalism.
The IFA advice is based on the highly respected research
indexes designed by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French and documented in their
empirical and peer-reviewed publications. The two professors rank
#1 and #2 on total downloads per paper among 10.5 million downloads on
the Social Sciences Research Network. Our current and independent advice incorporates 80
years of IFA Indexes and Indexfolio risk
and return data, third generation index fund designs and 25 years of refined
passive trading techniques employed by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA.)
IFA does not accept payments from DFA or from any other recommended investments.
IFA is exclusively paid by its 2,000+ clients for its advice on the optimal
wealth management of their assets.
IFA plays several roles in the process of providing investment advice. They
may be summarized with these seven roles:
- The Expert: You need an advisor who can provide expertise
in assessing the state of your finances and developing risk-appropriate investment
strategies to help you meet your goals.
- The independent Voice: The global financial turmoil of
the past two years has demonstrated the value of an independent and objective
voice in a world full of product pushers and salespeople.
- The Listener: The emotions triggered by financial upheaval
are real. IFA will listen to your fears, seek out the issues driving those
feelings and provide practical long-term answers.
- The Teacher: Getting you beyond the fear-and-flight phase
of investing often is just a matter of teaching you about risk and return,
the power of diversification, the importance of asset allocation and the
virtue of discipline. With IFA's extensive investor education program, we
a unique set of tools to be your teacher.
- The Architect: Once these lessons are understood, IFA
becomes an architect, helping you to build a long-term wealth management
strategy that caters to your own risk capacity and lifetime goals.
- The Coach: Even when the strategy is in place, doubts
and fears will inevitably arise in the your mind. At this point, IFA becomes
a coach, reinforcing academic investment principles and keeping you on track.
- The Guardian: Beyond these roles is a long-term role as a kind of lighthouse keeper or guardian, scanning the horizon for issues that may affect you and keeping you informed.
IFA adds value through matching people with portfolios by
carefully qualifying and quantifying 5 dimensions of an investor's Risk
Capacity and matching it to 5 dimensions of a portfolio's Risk
Exposure. This process produces investor-specific optimal returns by applying
the IFA proprietary concept of 10dRisk™.
IFA obtains academically identified capital market rates of returns for its
clients from about 17,000 public companies in the U.S. and about 40 other countries
around the world. IFA then designs highly tax-managed and low cost trading
strategies, maintains ongoing proper risk exposures through rebalancing, manages
cash inflows and outflows, and provides online monthly
and inception to date detailed measurements of client performance relative
to the IFA Indexes and other traditional benchmarks. This ongoing reporting
on performance, gains, income and tax reporting is exclusively available at
IFA and adds significant value since measurement is essential to improvement.
This process positions our clients for an investment experience that optimizes
the trade off between risk and return, based on 81 years of historical index
data.
The IFA Investment Principles:
1. Capitalism works
on average and over
time. This statement might be explained by Hebner's estimate that more
than 100,000 public companies over 80 years have earned an average
annual profit about 10%/year. If companies or stockholders of those companies
desired capital, they traded their stock certificates for cash from investors.
Through this trade, stockholders gave up the stock's future return of about
10% per year (currently
9.26%). That return has been driven up over the last 80 years and 10 months
by the average profits of those simulated
and actual S&P 500 companies. This is known as the "cost of
capital" and the cost of capital is paid to the investors.
2. Risk
and return have a positive correlation.
3. Free markets match prices to
current levels of uncertainty, so that buyers can earn a risk-appropriate return.
4. The
greater the risk, the longer the time required to obtain the expected return. Investors
should capture the average return of all stocks and the average return of a
sufficient number
of months.
5. Passively invest, diversify to
the maximum, maintain
a small and value tilt and keep turnover,
costs and taxes to a minimum.
6. Risk
exposure must be initially matched to the investor's risk capacity, then
monitored and maintained through rebalancing.
7. Avoid capital
gains and dividends and realize
losses in taxable accounts.
IFA manages brokerage, IRA, 401k, 403b, profit
sharing, and all other investment accounts. We also facilitate IRA rollovers
from 401ks and 403bs. IFA also provides investment advice to individuals, trusts,
corporations, non-profits, and public and private institutions. For institutional
accounts, please see our Institutional Division website: ifa-i.com.
See our SEC public disclosures HERE.
About Advisors
President and Founder
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Mark Hebner is the founder and President of Index Funds Advisors, Inc., author of the ifa.com and indexfunds.com web sites, and the book, Index Funds: The 12-Step Program for Active Investors. He has been nominated as the author of one of the three all-time greatest investment books, along with Warren Buffett and John Bogle. He is a frequent lecturer and has attended over thirty investment conferences and is considered the leading internet provider of information on index funds and especially information on Dimensional Funds Advisors mutual funds and portfolios of the research indexes used by DFA. He is an Investment Advisor Representative (Series 7 and 65) and has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of California at Irvine and a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from the University of New Mexico with a specialization in Nuclear Pharmacy. |
Toll Free: 1-888-643-3133 Email: gordon@ifa.com |
Gordon Shuler has been an
investment services professional for over 10 years and is an Investment
Advisor Representative (Series 65). He has completed two Dimensional
Fund Advisors Conferences for Investment Advisors and is an expert in
Index Funds investing. He was previously employed at large high technology firms including General Electric Co. and Hewlett-Packard, as well as several small start-up firms in the high technology area of computer-aided engineering. He has a B.S. Degree in Production Management from the California State University, Long Beach, with a specialization in Operations Research & Statistics.
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