Shun the benchmark huggers

If you don't want the hassle of stock picking, you have two main options, says Marina Gerner. But whichever you choose, avoid the closet trackers.

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If you want to put your money into the stockmarket, but don't want to go to the effort and risk of picking individual stocks, you have two main options. You can invest via an actively managed fund that will charge a relatively high annual fee for a fund manager to invest your money in the hope that he or she can beat the market (unusual, but it does happen). Or you can use a passively managed fund that will charge a relatively low annual fee for tracking an index in other words, you'll get the return on the market (less costs), but there's no chance of beating it.

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Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.