Index funds being illegal just means they're illegal for the poor and middle class. Any person with sufficient wealth could construct a personal index fund manually by buying the individual stocks. You would probably need millions to make this a worthwhile exercise.

Somewhat related, I really want to see someone offer some kind of customizable index fund. Let me start with a base index, and then exclude or include companies at will. e.g. start with the S&P 500, kick out companies like Exxon and Facebook and add in Tesla (pre inclusion), while the service auto weights investments appropriately.

> I really want to see someone offer some kind of customizable index fund

You and me both! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25552346

(Also, to your point, as someone commented on that thread this does already exist if you have enough money)

Hmm. It looks like Wealthfront offers direct indexing for reasonably small account sizes. But it's not clear from this description if they actually allow customizing stock picks. Could be worth investigating. Their fees might also make it unattractive.

https://support.wealthfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/211005023-...