What percentage of actively managed funds beat the index?
Actively Managed Funds Come to Life
Index funds seek market-average returns, while active mutual funds try to outperform the market. Active mutual funds typically have higher fees than index funds. Index fund performance is relatively predictable; active mutual fund performance tends to be less so.
Less than 10% of active large-cap fund managers have outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 15 years. The biggest drag on investment returns is unavoidable, but you can minimize it if you're smart. Here's what to look for when choosing a simple investment that can beat the Wall Street pros.
Nearly 70-80 per cent of actively managed equity funds have outperformed their benchmarks over 10 years, while the share of equity funds beating benchmarks over five years and three years has improved to 55-60 per cent and 45-50 per cent.
Research: 89% of fund managers fail to beat the market
According to this report, 88.99% of large-cap US funds have underperformed the S&P500 index over ten years.
| Fund | 2023 performance (%) | 5yr performance (%) |
|---|---|---|
| T. Rowe Price US Blue Chip Equity | 49.54 | 81.57 |
| MS INVF US Growth | 49.29 | 62.08 |
| New Capital US Growth | 48.68 | N/A |
| T. Rowe Price US Large Cap Growth Equity Fund | 48.64 | 98.92 |
If a benchmark like the Standard & Poor's 500 returned 10%, the average managed fund investing in similar stocks would therefore have returned 9%, while an index fund would have returned 9.8% to 9.9%, giving up only a small amount for fees.
Although it is very difficult, the market can be beaten. Every year, some managers boast better numbers than the market indices. A small fraction even manages to do so over a longer period. Over the horizon of the last 20 years, less than 10% of U.S. actively managed funds have beaten the market.
Over the full period, just 2% of actively managed Large-Cap Core funds beat the S&P 500. Even in categories such as small- and mid-sized stocks, and growth — which benefited from the tailwinds of an outperforming universe — a minimum of 81% of actively managed funds underperformed the benchmark.
Even without that incremental burden, the U.S. Mid-Year 2023 Scorecard showed that over the long term, active managers failed with great persistence in every single equity asset class. For example, over the prior 20 years: 93% of funds underperformed the benchmark S&P Composite 1500.
What is the success rate of active funds?
Over the 10 years through June 2022, success rates for active managers were less than 25% in over half of the 72 categories surveyed across broad asset classes. Just three categories – global equity income, UK equity income, and Switzerland property – delivered a success rate for active managers over 50%.
It found that over the course of one year, 51.08% of actively-managed mutual funds underperformed the S&P 500, and 48.92% of actively-managed funds outperformed the S&P 500.
Here's what the firm found from 20 years of research: Active vs. Passive: The active success rate for equity was 76% overall with actively managed funds surpassing passive funds 73% of the time.
Is Berkshire Hathaway Stock A Buy Now? Berkshire Hathaway stock generally lagged the S&P 500 index since late 2017, but managed to handily outperform the benchmark index in 2022. It lagged again in 2023 after giving up some spring and summer gains.
If you had invested in Netflix ten years ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today. According to our calculations, a $1000 investment made in February 2014 would be worth $9,138.15, or a gain of 813.81%, as of February 12, 2024, and this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.
Putting Your Money in the S&P 500 Will Make You More Money
Simply putting all of your money into the S&P 500 index ETF, SPY, and forgetting about it will almost always yield higher returns than paying a financial advisor for advice. The S&P 500 beats most financial advisor portfolios most of the time.
I put my personal 401(k) and a lot of my mutual fund investing in four types of mutual funds: growth, growth and income, aggressive growth, and international. I personally spread mine in 25% of those four.
Nasdaq 100 has significantly outperformed S&P 500 in terms of performance. Over the past 15 years, Nasdaq 100 has delivered a CAGR of around 16%, while S&P 500 has returned about 8%.
Ken Griffin's Citadel Is an Exception. Hedge funds that seek gains by meshing different strategies have outshown most others in recent years. In 2023, some of these multistrategy funds continued to do well, but it was hard to beat the sizzling returns of benchmarks like the S&P 500.
For example, the last time the average active U.S. stock fund beat the S&P 500 stock index for a full calendar year was in 2009. And over a full 20-year period ending last December, fewer than 10 percent of active U.S. stock funds managed to beat their benchmarks.
Are actively managed accounts worth it?
The goal of active management is to outperform a market index or, in a market downturn, to book losses that are less severe than a market index suffers. However, active management has fallen out of favor with many investors who find that its outcomes are less consistent than passive management strategies.
Disadvantages include the lack of downside protection, no choice in index composition, and it cannot beat the market (by definition).
Over the past 10 years, 94% of our actively managed funds performed better than their peer-group averages.
The challenge is that as investors recognize a manager's skill, they place more assets under his management. Those additional assets make it harder for the manager to achieve the same level of performance—among other reasons, because the bigger a fund is, the more likely it is to move prices.
The average yearly return of the S&P 500 is 11.13% over the last 50 years, as of the end of December 2023.
