The investing term for a fund that aims to track a market index rather than select investments actively is an index fund.
An index fund is a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund designed to reproduce the performance of a chosen market index, before fees and expenses. It may hold all the index's securities or use sampling and other methods to approximate the index. The fund's objective is tracking, not trying to choose securities that outperform the benchmark.
John C. Bogle launched the first retail index mutual fund in the United States in 1976 through Vanguard. The fund was initially called First Index Investment Trust and later became the Vanguard 500 Index Fund. Indexing subsequently expanded across stock, bond, international, sector, and commodity markets.
An index fund can have lower trading activity and expenses than many actively managed funds, but costs and tracking differences vary. Tracking an index also means accepting the index's declines. Investors should check which index a fund follows, its expense ratio, holdings, and tracking performance.