About Index Funds Advisors, Inc.



Corporate Headquarters, Irvine CA

Index Funds Advisors, Inc.
19200 Von Karman Ave.,
Suite 150
Irvine, CA 92612

Toll Free: 1-888-643-3133
Local Phone: 949-502-0050
Fax: 949-502-0048

www.ifa.com


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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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



Mark T. Hebner

President and Founder

 

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.





Gordon Shuler

Investment Advisor Representative
IFA Vice President

Toll Free: 1-888-643-3133
Local #: 949-502-0050
Fax: 949-502-0048

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 has presented a variety of investment topics to hundreds of seminar attendees and has periodically provided commentary and interviews on local radio stations. Previously in the computer industry for 25 years, his experience provides a solid background for the highly technical investment methodology offered by IFA.

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.

 

 

 





©2010 Index Funds Advisors, Inc. All rights reserved.

This site is for the use of clients and potential clients of Index Funds Advisors, Inc. and the IFA Network Members.
It is not to be used by any other investment advisor or investment professional as an information/marketing materials source, asset allocator, risk capacity or risk tolerance assessment, or for any other purpose. The right to download, store and/or output any material on this internet site, or the Index Funds: The 12-Step Program eBook, is granted for viewing use only and this grant only applies to clients and potential clients of Index Funds Advisors, Inc. and the IFA Network Members. Reproduction or editing by any means, mechanical or electronic, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of Index Funds Advisors, Inc. is strictly prohibited and subject to prosecution under U.S. and International copyright and trademark laws.

DISCLAIMER: THERE ARE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, AS TO ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR RESULTS OBTAINED FROM ANY INFORMATION POSTED ON THIS OR ANY LINKED INTERNET SITE. Your use of this site is acknowledgment that you have read and understood the full disclaimer. Past performance does not guarantee future results

WARNING: Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investment returns and principal value will fluctuate, so that investors' shares, when sold, may be worth more or less than their original cost. Investing in any mutual fund, index or actively managed, does not guarantee that an investor will make money, avoid losing capital, or indicate that the investment is risk-free. Actively managed funds sometimes outperform index funds. You just don't know in advance which actively managed fund will outperform the appropriate index. Just because a mutual fund is an index mutual fund, it does not guarantee a performance superior to an actively managed mutual fund. There are no absolute guarantees in investing. When reviewing any backtested performance information on this internet site, please read the Disclosure for Backtested Performance Information (click here to read the Disclosure for Backtested Performance Information.)


Index Funds Advisors, Inc
.  —  19200 Von Karman Ave., Suite 150  —   Irvine, CA 92612  —  
Call Toll Free: 888-643-3133
Local Phone: 949-502-0050  —  Fax: 949-502-0048 — Email: info @ ifa.com