Okay, so you don&#x27;t know how index funds track an index. That&#x27;s too bad, but put that aside for a moment.<p>The notion that long-term investors in <i>anything</i> should be punished so severely on the front end (if you understood compound interest you would know that losing 0.1% right away is a bigger hit to the long-term investor than it at first appears, which is why basis points matter a lot when a long-term investor is weighing the cost of a mutual fund or taking into account brokerage fees) as part of a tax designed to penalize HFT and derivatives trading is just completely strange. It&#x27;s an indicator that the people who created the law don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing or have (really dumb) ulterior motives.