1.   Fund managers are increasingly developing portfolios that track world indices.

2.   Barclays Global Investors is now preparing to introduce in the United States the first exchange-traded funds that track bond indexes.

3.   Barclays Investment Management runs its funds with fund managers and teams of fund managers actively making stock selections, instead of tracking indexes.

4.   A futures contract on the MDAX is also in the pipeline, allowing investors to track the index more closely and increasing flows of cash to the German market.

5.   A key to determining the best benchmark is a little number called R-squared, which tells you how closely a fund tracks an index.

6.   But he is not obliged to guarantee that a trust tracks its index on a wild day.

7.   By contrast, exchange-traded funds, which generally track indexes, are priced efficiently and are more tax efficient.

8.   Costs tend to be lower than those for actively managed mutual funds, because the ETFs track indexes and trade infrequently.

9.   Funds set up to track market indexes solve some problems, but they do not offer investors much choice or control of risk, he says.

10.   Hundreds of billions of dollars are held in funds that track indexes, and many other funds use indexes as benchmarks for judging returns.