Quote Originally Posted by crappieseeker View Post
so is a total stock market fund or an S&P 500 fund an index stock fund or something different?
They're index funds. The S&P 500 is 500 large US companies. When you invest in the S&P 500, you are buying a portion of each of the 500 companies.

The total stock index holds about 4,000 US stocks. When you invest in that, you are buying a portion of each of the 4,000 companies.