About Index Funds Advisors, Inc.

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 and also is a 50% owner of IFA Canada, Inc. (see ifacanada.com).

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.

The chart below shows IFA's growth of assets under management since inception in 1999.

IFA assists clients in creating and purchasing diversified portfolios of index funds, primarily from Dimensional Fund Advisors (see DFA Brochure.), Vanguard, Fidelity and Barclays Global Investors (iShares). Dimensional Fund Advisors strives to deliver the performance of capital markets and add value through portfolio design and trading. The firm departs from the rules and rigidity of traditional index funds and avoids the cost-generating activity of stock picking and market timing. Instead DFA focuses on the dimensions of capital markets that reward investors and they deliver them as intelligently and effectively as possible. Their indexes tend to overweight small cap and value stocks, where expected returns are greater. Over 1,000 Investment Advisors rated DFA as the best overall company in the mutual fund business in several surveys. We primarily use their funds to create globally diversified portfolios of index funds. DFA funds are only available to individual investors through DFA approved investment advisors. IFA is approved for the purchase of DFA funds, but receives no compensation from DFA or any other investments. For institutional investors, we design diversified index manager portfolios to minimize vendor concentration risk.

You may select Charles Schwab & Company (Asset Protection, Financial Condition), Fidelity Investments or TD Ameritrade as the custodian for your account. (see SIPC) If you already have an account with any of these firms, you can easily assign your account to our Master Account to become one of our clients.

We currently have 13 investment advisors; Mark Hebner, Gordon Shuler, Dave Mertz, Brendan Connelly, Denise Delaney, Becky Vasquez, Brad von Grote, Dan Solin, Ted Fischer, Ben Brinkerhoff, Matt Cooper, Brent DeVore, and Venkat Yarlagadda. In addition we have 17 other employees and several independent contractors. In total, about 80 people have contributed to the IFA investor education projects of books, websites, brochures, audio recordings, and videos. We hope that we have helped you better understand how markets work.

We also have an IFA Advisor Network program, where select financial advisors license the information and tools on our web site for their prospective clients and existing clients. These advisors have a license agreement with IFA and are approved to use the materials on this site. Advisors without such an agreement are not authorized to use any of our materials, including but not limited to, the investor education and asset allocation tools. If your advisor is using these tools without authorization, please take note of their ethics.