The S&P 500 Has Reached an All-Time High: Should You Invest Now or Wait for a Correction?

After three months without a winner, two different people will now split the nearly $1.8 billion Powerball Jackpot. As lottery advertising frequently says, you gotta be in it to win it. But the chances of winning that historic jackpot were roughly 1 in 292 million!You have much better odds of "winning" if you invest in the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC), a fact that remains true even as the index sits near all-time highs. Here's why now is as good a time as any to start buying the S&P 500.The purpose of the S&P 500 index is to be representative of the broader U.S. economy. A committee selects roughly 500 businesses for the index that it believes are large and economically important based on certain criteria. The stocks of those businesses are market-cap weighted and combined to form the index, and it provides a relatively fair representation of the broader U.S. economy. Investors can easily buy the entire S&P 500 index via a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund (ETF).Continue readingWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool