We study the class of all rearrangement-invariant ( = r.i.) function spaces E on [0,1] such that there exists 0 < q < 1 for which $\parallel {\sum }_{k=1}^n{\xi }_k{\parallel }_E\le C{n}^q$, where ${{\xi }_k}_{k\ge 1}\subset E$ is an arbitrary sequence of independent identically distributed symmetric random variables on [0,1] and C > 0 does not depend on n. We completely characterize all Lorentz spaces having this property and complement classical results of Rodin and Semenov for Orlicz spaces $exp\left(L_p\right)$, p ≥ 1. We further apply our results to the study of Banach-Saks index sets in...