I’ll dig into what VTSAX actually is and how it’s performed while discussing what makes the “Vermont Saxophone” such a popular choice for do-it-yourself investors.
VTSAX is a mutual fund, more specifically an index fund, comprised of over 3,600 publicly traded companies based in the United States. As index funds do, by definition, it is designed to track a benchmark. The chosen benchmark is the CRSP US Total Market Index.
The Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), an affiliate of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, does have some inclusion and exclusion criteria to be considered “investible,” so the index (and thereby VTSAX) doesn’t actually hold every stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or Nasdaq.