At exactly the time panicky investors were considering getting out of the stock market, investment adviser Robert Jorgensen was telling clients they probably don’t own enough stocks. "When was the last year the market lost 26 percent?" he asks. "When was the last time it lost more than 5 percent?" It was 1974 when the market fell by 26 percent, and then in 1977 it lost 5 percent in a year. Though the market suffers an occasional "adjustment," the market is like crabgrass. It always come back. Over a 10-year period, says Jorgensen, the likelihood of losing money is nil. Whether a person is just starting a career or just ending one, he says, "if you expect to live 10 more years, you should increase your equity level."

Jorgensen, an 18-year veteran personal investment adviser with Salomon Smith Barney, on April 1 launched a San Diego-based firm called RunMoney.com. Jorgensen believes that high net worth individuals and organizations (those with $100,000 or more in liquidity) should shun mutual funds and place their cash instead in an individually managed account. The advantages include professional management targeted to the investor's goal, higher long-term return and lower taxes. "It’s not the return on your account that matters most," says Jorgensen. "What matters is how much of it you get to keep after taxes."

Because mutual fund performance is measured primarily by short-term results, there is a high turnover of securities held within funds, which forces investors to pay up to 39 percent of their gains in taxes. This compares to a tax bite of 20 percent if the securities in the fund are held for the capital gains holding period. Next January the capital gains tax rate falls to 18 percent, making it even more advantageous to hold stocks for at least one year and one day.

The mission of RunMoney.com is to match up investors with the money manager that suits them best. To achieve that goal, Jorgensen has linked up with 120 investment managers representing 23 different investment styles. Brandes Investment Partners and Nicholas Applegate are the two local investment houses on Jorgensen's list. Ordinarily the management fee for an individually managed account is around 2.1 percent per year. By leveraging Internet technology and reducing overhead costs, RunMoney.com is offering these services for an all-inclusive fee of 1.5 percent per year, which makes the service competitive with no-load mutual funds.

RunMoney.com is a hybrid new-tech/old-tech company. All of a client's business can be accomplished through the firm's Web site and call center if necessary, including some rather sophisticated analysis that allows investors to compare the mutual funds they own to the service they are likely to get in a privately managed account. For those investors who still need face time, Jorgensen and his staff will arrange personal consultations.

It’s easy enough to check out the company. Simply log onto www.RunMoney.com. Jorgensen is not the first and only to offer this service, but he does win bonus points for the originality of his company slogan. "RunMoney because Wall Street is no place for pedestrians."

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Investors who 1) want to avoid the taxes and fees that accompany all mutual funds, even no-loads; 2) have no interest in stock-picking; 3) worry about achieving enough portfolio diversity on their own; or 4) agree with the experts who say that nobody, even professional investors, can outperform the markets over the long run have a simple alternative. No, it’s not an index fund, but it is close and it is even better.

The American Stock Exchange, which is now merged with Nasdaq, offers a fairly extensive array of index shares, which combine all the opportunities of indexes with the advantages of stock trading. The best known among these index shares are "Spiders," which are technically called Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts, or SPDRs, and "Diamonds," or the Dow Jones index shares. The index shares can be bought and sold through regular, discount or online brokers just like other securities. Like an index fund, the shares mimic the markets they represent. The Spider, for example, is a unit investment trust that holds shares of all the companies in the S&P 500 and closely tracks the price performance and dividend yield of the index. Slight misalignments occur when the trust must be rebalanced and must adjust for an inflow of dividends. Diamonds are set up the same way, only they use the 30 stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial average. The ticker symbol for Spiders is SPY, and the symbol for Diamonds is DIA.

Although an investor pays the typical brokerage fee when buying or selling, neither of these instruments involves a sales load. Unless a stock is added to or deleted from an index, generally there is little trading within a fund, so capital gains taxes are kept at a minimum. However, owners of Spiders and Diamonds will be subject to taxes on the investor's share of dividends as they are granted. In most cases expenses for Spiders and other index products are lower than those on a mutual fund or even an index fund. Annual expenses for Spiders are 0.18 percent, or put another way, for an investment of $10,000 the annual expense would be $18. There are no 12b-1 fees or hidden costs sometimes found in mutual funds. As for performance, index products historically have outperformed actively managed mutual funds over the long term.

For those who have faith that the markets will revive given time, but feel unsure about which stocks will lead in the recovery, index-based investments offer a conservative, easy-to-understand way to participate in the next bull market. To learn more about Spiders, Diamonds and their strangely named relatives, log onto www.nasdaq.com or telephone the American Stock Exchange (Amex) at 1 (800) 843-2639.

Janet Lowe is author of several investment books, including "Value Investing Made Easy" (McGraw Hill) and "Warren Buffett Speaks" (John Wiley & Sons).