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• For those who are decades away from retirement, the clear choice for retirement dollars is the stock market.
  
  
• Within your retirement plan, you have the following basic choices for your money: money market funds, stable value accounts, bond mutual funds, stock mutual funds, and individual stocks and bonds.
  
  
• We at The Motley Fool always advocate index fund investing over "managed" mutual funds.  More than eight out of ten actively managed equity mutual funds have failed to beat the market average over the last 50 years. 
  
  
• Seek out the index fund option in your employer-sponsored retirement plan, or in your IRA or taxable account if you're not a more experienced investor. Though not all employer-sponsored retirement plans include an index mutual fund option, more and more do all the time.
  
  
• We recommend that you learn more about index funds if you're not familiar with them, and that leads to our homework assignment.