What is Russel Index and S&P Index funds?

Answer 1

Since there is about 24,000 publically traded companies in the U.S. there is no such thing as a "market." There are however popular sampling technics such as the Dow and the SP 500 to show general market sediment.

S&P stands for Standard and Poor, which tried to track the market Blue chips using 500 of the biggest companies in the U.S. There is now a S&P 400 that tracks mid cap companies.

Russel is a mutual fund company that offers several groups of stocks called indexes. The most popular is Russell 2000 which tracks 2,000 small caps. The reason there are so many is that there is so much incoming money from the Russel 2000, that if there was a smaller amount, the index would be quickly overbought.