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The term "spider" is actually just a convenient pronunciation of the acronym SPDR, which stands for "Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts." All we really knew about this type of investment instrument was that it's designed to mirror the price of the S&P 500, much like an index mutual fund. Beyond that, we looked to some of big name financial commentary sites to get the details¿ Our first stop was The Motley Fool, home base of some of the nineties hottest investing pundits. By entering the term "SPDR" into their site's search box, we were led straight to a very informative discussion of spiders. It seems that the main benefit of SPDRs is that they can be traded throughout the day,
much like stocks, whereas mutual funds only trade at the close of business. They also benefit from low expense ratios and different treatment of capital gains. However, like stocks, purchasing SPDRs will cost you a brokerage commission and thus, if you like to invest a small amount into an index fund every month, they aren't always the way to go. Just to cover all the bases, we went on to another cool investment site, The Armchair Millionaire, and searched on the term. We lucked out again and pulled up an even more detailed description of SPDRs, complete with table illustrating the different returns on SPDRs and index mutual funds. For more
investment sites, check out the top level of Yahoo!'s Finance and Investment category (under Business and Economy). There you'll find the Fool, Armchair Millionaire, as well as other popular sites like Quicken.com and The Online Investor.
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