I just skimmed the
prospectus for the Schwab S&P 500 Index fund SWPPX and found something interesting (underlined in bold):
To pursue its goal, the fund generally invests in stocks that are included in the S&P 500 Index†. It is the fund’s policy that under normal circumstances it will invest at least 80% of its net assets (including, for this purpose, any borrowings for investment purposes) in these stocks; typically, the actual percentage is considerably higher. The fund will notify its shareholders at least 60 days before changing this policy.
The fund generally will seek to replicate the performance of the index by giving the same weight to a given stock as the index does. However, when the investment adviser believes it is in the best interest of the fund, such as to avoid purchasing odd-lots (i.e., purchasing less than the usual number of shares traded for a security), for tax considerations, or to address liquidity considerations with respect to a stock, the investment adviser may cause the fund’s weighting of a stock to be more or less than the index’s weighting of the stock. The fund may sell securities that are represented in the index in anticipation of their removal from the index, or buy securities that are not yet represented in the index in anticipation of their addition to the index.
The S&P 500 Index includes the stocks of 500 leading U.S. publicly traded companies from a broad range of industries. Standard & Poor’s, the company that maintains the index, uses a variety of measures to determine which stocks are listed in the index. Each stock is represented in the index in proportion to its market capitalization.
The fund may invest in derivatives, principally futures contracts, and lend its securities to minimize the gap in performance that naturally exists between any index fund and its corresponding index. This gap occurs mainly because, unlike the index, the fund incurs expenses and must keep a small portion of its assets in cash for business operations. By using futures, the fund potentially can offset a portion of the gap attributable to its cash holdings. In addition, any income realized through securities lending may help reduce the portion of the gap attributable to expenses.
The fund may concentrate its investments in an industry or group of industries to the extent that the index the fund is designed to track is also so concentrated.
Tracking Error Risk. As an index fund, the fund seeks to track the performance of the index, although it may not be successful in doing so. The divergence between the performance of the fund and the index, positive or negative, is called “tracking error.” Tracking error can be caused by many factors and it may be significant. For example, the fund may not invest in certain securities in the index, match the securities’ weighting to the index, or the fund may invest in securities not in the index, due to regulatory, operational, custodial or liquidity constraints; corporate transactions; asset valuations; transaction costs and timing; tax considerations; and index rebalancing, which may result in tracking error. The fund may attempt to offset the effects of not being invested in certain index securities by making substitute investments, but these efforts may not be successful. In addition, cash flows into and out of the fund, operating expenses and trading costs all affect the ability of the fund to match the performance of the index, because the index does not have to manage cash flows and does not incur any costs.
They do not define what "anticipation" means. Also noted that they "lend out" shares to shorts!
