Active managers on average underperform their benchmark indexes and their passive peers, but one study suggests advisors might want to use them anyway.

That's because the presence and proportion of actively managed funds within a portfolio appears to predict better portfolio performance overall, according to research published on Tuesday by Boston-based Natixis Global Asset Management.

Overall, portfolios favoring active management outperformed similar passive allocations by 0.26 percent during the first half of 2017, according to the Natixis Portfolio Clarity U.S. Trends Report.

Throughout 2015 and 2016, portfolios favoring passive products outperformed their active peers in Natixis’s analysis.

According to Natixis, it didn’t pay to diversify across asset classes during the first half of 2017, but geographic diversification helped boost portfolio returns.

Echoing other first-half market reviews, Natixis found that the most successful portfolios included higher allocations to U.S., international and emerging market equities, tilted more towards growth equities than value; utilized actively managed mid-cap, small-cap and international equity funds; and delivered lower exposures to alternatives and fixed income investments.

The study found that exposure to international equities in particular drove stronger investment returns.

The top quartile of portfolios in Natixis’s first half analysis, which tended to have a lower exposure to passive investments, outperformed the bottom quartile of portfolios by 300 basis points.

Natixis also reported portfolio allocation trends through the first half of 2017 by asset class. Investors are allocating slightly more to equities than they did in 2016 and are keeping lower amounts of cash in their portfolios. Fixed-income allocations went up from an average of 30.7 percent in 2016 to 32.1 percent in the first half of 2017. A larger proportion of assets was also being invested in asset allocation funds like target-date vehicles.

Allocations to alternatives, on the other hand, plummeted from 7.5 percent in 2016 to 5.5 percent in the first half of 2017.

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