The index measures the difference between employers saying they plan to add jobs and those planning to cut them.

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First, actively-managed mutual funds cannot earn excess returns over index funds because in aggregate they earn the same as index funds, less the difference in cost.

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The biggest difference is that index funds operate in the way all mutual funds do, in that they are priced at the close of the trading day based on the net asset value (NAV) of the underlying securities.

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Liken it to the difference between a no-load index fund and an index ETF.

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Table 3 highlights the difference in fund holdings for all index changes.

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Based on Factsheet data from MSCI and FTSE, this difference will increase the holdings in developed market index funds and reduce the holdings in the total international fund.

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More than 50, 000 individual prices are collected in each survey round, and a cost-of-living index is calculated from the price data to express the difference in the cost of living between any two cities.

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The second significant difference between developed market FTSE and MSCI is in the number of index constituents.

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