tracker fund

Index Fund

A mutual fund that is not actively-managed and simply tracks a benchmark index. That is, the investment company managing the mutual fund places the liquidity in securities represented in a certain index. Thus, when that index increases in price, so does the mutual fund, and vice versa. An exchange-traded fund is a prime example of an index fund. Many popular tracker funds track the S&P 500 and other S&P indices. An index fund is less commonly called an index fund. See also: Closet index fund, SPDR.

Farlex Financial Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All Rights Reserved

tracker fund

a PORTFOLIO of company SHARES which is designed to exactly mirror.

Collins Dictionary of Business, 3rd ed. © 2002, 2005 C Pass, B Lowes, A Pendleton, L Chadwick, D O’Reilly and M Afferson

tracker fund

a PORTFOLIO of company SHARES that is designed to exactly mirror in composition and relative ‘weighting’ the shares making up a selected share index such as the ‘Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) - 100 Share Index’. Tracker funds are operated by UNIT TRUSTS, INVESTMENT

TRUSTS and other INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS. Unlike many funds that are actively managed by fund managers who buy and sell shares at their discretion n a wide range of companies, tracker funds are passively managed and, as their name implies, simply ‘track’, in a robotic way, the shares comprising the target index. See INDIVIDUAL SAVINGS ACCOUNT (ISA).

Collins Dictionary of Economics, 4th ed. © C. Pass, B. Lowes, L. Davies 2005