Not only do active mutual funds struggle to maintain performance over time—they struggle to survive.
According to the S&P Dow Jones Indices most recent Persistence Scorecard, released on Monday, very few active fund managers consistently outperform their peers, and quite a few end up liquidating their funds or changing styles over time.
SPDJI looked at fund managers’ performance persistence across two consecutive five-year periods, from 2010 through 2014 and from 2015 through 2019. Around one-fifth, 21%, of the funds performing in the top quartile in the first period repeated that performance in the second period.
Between the two periods studied, the most likely outcome for a top-quartile domestic equity fund was merger, liquidation or style change, with nearly two-fifths of the funds studied (39%) suffering that fate.
While SPDJI does offer periodic comparisons of active manager returns as compared to the returns of passive indexes and funds, the Persistence Scorecard tracks how likely managers across different fund categories are to persist in outperforming others in their category over time.
The scorecard is intended to be a clear picture of manager skill because, according to SPDJI, “genuine skill is likely to persist, while luck is random and soon dissipates.”
Over a single five-year period, only 3.84% of domestic equity funds that performed in the top half of their category in 2015 were able to maintain that status annually through 2019, and just 0.18% of the top-quartile domestic equity funds sustained their performance over the same period.
But over shorter time periods, domestic equity managers have done a better job of sustaining outperformance. Of the top-quartile domestic equity funds in 2017, over 37% managed to remain in the top quartile through the end of 2019. More than three-fifths of 2017’s top-quartile equity funds, 61.34%, ended up in the top quartile at the end of 2018.
Looking across equity categories, no top quartile mid-cap or multicap funds from 2015 were able to sustain that performance through December 2019. Small-cap managers were the most successful at persistent outperformance, with 0.77% of 2015’s top-quartile small-cap funds sustaining their performance through December 2019.
While the report demonstrated that even top-quartile funds may close over time, bottom quartile funds were significantly more likely to close. Fourth-quartile funds were the most likely to liquidate over three- and five-year time periods. Almost 38% off the bottom-quartile multicap fnds of 2010-2014 had disappeared by 2019.
But style changes were not correlated with fund performance, according to the scorecard. Top, middle and bottom performers within a category all had similar chances of style drift over three- and five-year periods. Multicap funds were the most likely to undergo style change, with 31% changing over three years and 40% over five years.
In fixed-income funds, 10 of 13 categories saw no top-quartile fund from 2015 maintain that status annually through 2019. The only categories showing any persistence were California municipal debt funds, of which 5.26% sustained top-quartile performance between 2015 and 2019; government long-term bond funds, of which 7.14% were able to sustain top quartile performance; and general municipal debt funds, of which 5.26% maintained their performance.