[wutbrodo]

There are robo advisors who will buy the individual securities in indices for you, as long as you have enough invested with them (50k? I forget). But the only advantage over simply buying the fund AFAIK is being able to tax loss harvest from the higher volatility of individual securities. Eg, if your two-security index has stock A go down 5% and stock B go up 6%,an index fund would simoly go up 1% while the actual basket would allow harvesting the losses from stock A.

As far as I can tell, this is a fairly minor advantage, and if I wasn't using a robo-advisor, i certainly wouldn't be managing the basket directly just for this ability.