Passive management, also known as passive strategy or index investing, is a style of management associated with mutual funds and ETFs where a fund's portfolio mirrors a market index. It is the opposite of active management in which a fund's manager attempts to beat the market with various investing strategies and buying or selling decisions of a portfolio's securities.

A short-term investment fund invests in short-term money market investments of high quality and low risk. This type of fund is considered to be one of the most conservative investments, and they are often used to protect capital. Short-term investment funds are generally expected to keep pace with inflation and earn marginally higher returns than a standard personal savings account.

A performance-based index is a stock index that adds the amount of all dividend payments, capital gains, and other cash disbursements to the net stock price. When measuring the performance over a given time period, the performance-based index will add these transactions to the net share price before calculating the index return. Some investors believe a performance-based calculation produces a more accurate measure of performance than the price approach.