Why would buying a fund be better than buying each Dow stock?

On a 10,000 dollar investment I would pay 4% in commissions after all have been bought and sold. Lets say that the investment lasts 30 years. The 4% commission would be higher because of all the spin offs. Over a 30 year period there would be many splits and many dividends. Would I make more on a DIA fund or more buying all the individual stocks one by one. With a fund, where do all the dividends go, into the fund handlers hand? Do the spin offs of DIA stocks account in a fund? Are they added into the fund?

I guess you have dissect every word on here. I meant the fees that I would have to pay for selling the spin offs.

If all you want to do is track the DJIA, then you should just buy the stocks yourself.

As you mentioned a mutual fund will be professionally managed and will charge huge fees. If you use Zecco.com then trading is free! So, use that if you buy the individual stocks so that you dont pay any fees.

In a fund, the dividends still eventually get paid to the fund holders. As far as spin offs etc. the fund manager has control over what to do; he may heavily weight some stocks and hold very little of another. It all depends...

if you can try it but i don't if the top 30 will let you directly invest better lookinto first and they will NOT accecpt fractional payment shares. Report It

Buying each individual stock one by one would be a big hassle, and extremely time consuming. A fund is an assortment of many stocks, and the price of the fund reflects the performance of its stocks, including spinoffs, splits, dividends, etc.

zecco has serious customer service issues stay away from them. second you got it wrong on the commisisons you are not charged a commission for a spin off split whatever unless you buy the spin off company. Third all you are doing is emulating the market NOT beating it. The goal is to BEAT the market. Which is why I don't mirrior any of the major indexes. As for the last part its up to the fund manager wether or not to add them.

You also wouldn't be able to afford to buy 100 shares of stock of each stock with only 10,000, so you would have to pay higher commissions/fee for a short lot - comm to buy and sell might be a lot higher than 4%. Dividends get paid to you and you can re-invest them automatically

Hopefully you would find a Fund with a lower entry and exit than that.

After all you are just looking for a fund that just buys and holds?

Stocks are very cheap to buy outright these days - 4% or even 2% is way over.

So if you are a buy and holder AND you have enough money to buy all 30 Dow Stocks then you will always be better off than pay 1% or 2% commission to enter an INDEX buy and hold fund).

With that ten thousand in a fund you get better diversification with a lower relative cost. Dividends are usually paid out to fund shareholders. And spinoffs should add to the value of your shares in the fund, the NAV.

Huge fees? 4% commissions? Broker copping dividends?
Listen, when you get over your mis-information and paranoia...try a reputable company like Fidelity...get into a couple of funds... cover the DOW if that's what you want... ( but DON'T " index"...it leaves no room for a professional manager to make changes,called IMPROVEMENTS, in your fund) That's what you pay your ( tiny ) fee for.
If you take a little risk... you'll beat the DOW or most indices by quite a bit ( I have three funds averaging over 32% per year..last four)....and I have NO complaints or misconceptions about what it happening !!
If you think the big , bad, broker is out to get your $ 20.00 just put your money in the bank and get 3.5 %
Added later: FEMKX..FLATX..EUROX

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a scaled average, not the actual average of the prices of its component stocks鈥攖he sum of the component prices is divided by a divisor, which changes over time, to generate the value of the index. So you would be hard pressed to duplicate the weighting of the DJIA by purchasing the individual stocks that make up the DJIA. You would need to constantly adjust the shares you hold in each component stock to match the index.

DIA is an ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) which closely matches the DJIA. It can be purchased and sold just like an individual stock and it does pay dividends from its compenent stocks.

So if you want to invest your $10,000 in the Dow component stocks it is much more practical and cost effective to simply purchase shares of DIA. Your returns will be similar (or better because of less commissions) to having split your $10K across the 30 Dow component stocks.