And so, it’s pretty nice to think that last year, 2008, is probably the best year indexing ever had in terms of performance. For the total stock market and the S&P 500—two good proxies for what is going on in the U.S. market—indexes of those two components put them in about the 65^th percentile [of overall fund performance], outperforming about two-thirds of all mutual fund managers. Sure, the decline was about 37%, but the typical U.S. manager went down about 40%; the typical developed market fund went down about 45 to 50%; and the typical emerging market fund went down 55 to 60%. So on the stock fund side, it was quite a triumph for indexing.

On the bond index fund side, it was even more of a triumph. The total bond market index was up 5% last year, outperforming about 85% of comparable bond funds, thanks largely to a big drop, as most of you may know, in Treasury yield.

So we’ve got this wonderful growth rate. We’ve got a dominant industry position. And yet, some unusual things are happening. We will take a look at what is driving the growth of indexing by looking first at ETFs—exchange-traded index funds. And as the next chart shows, I describe them as a truly great business model. Hear carefully when I say “business model.” We will talk about other kinds of models later on.

You can see in the next chart that ETFs have come from almost nowhere—back in the early 1990s, when the first exchange-traded fund was started—to the fact that they are now actually just a hair behind in terms of equity fund assets the traditional index funds, the kind of funds that Vanguard pretty much runs: $457 billion compared to $460 billion, or $456 billion plus. So the ETFs have proved great competition for the classic index funds, basically what I thought about all those years ago.

I’m often asked, “Who is going to win the war: mutual funds or exchange-traded funds?” That is not a good question, because exchange-traded funds are mutual funds. They are just mutual funds you can trade all day long in real time. We will talk a little bit about that. So what we have is, what is growing is index funds for people who want to trade or who believe that the opportunity to trade or the ability to trade is important, intraday trading; and equity mutual funds, which are more designed for long-term investors.

But going over to the next chart, you will see pretty much what has driven the growth of index funds even more clearly than the previous chart. Exchange-traded funds were about 2% of the index fund business back in about 1997, 1998. By 2000, they got up to about 11%. In 2008-2009, they are 11% of equity fund assets, just exactly the same, almost exactly the same as the 11% in traditional index funds.

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