[VLM]

Speaking of commission, it "has to" be a fund because the SP500 is not constant, companies are continually being added and removed. Otherwise you'd directly owe substantial commissions and you'd have to be careful to avoid various capital gains income taxes while endlessly rebalancing.

There are a lot of index funds, for no apparent reason the first one I checked was VFINX and it's annual expense ratio is 0.17% which is pretty low compared to the average return over the past 90 years around 10%.

So the actual result would be a little lower, although not staggeringly so.