Stats › Active, passive and flows › Active vs passive
Active funds versus the index
An active fund manager has one job, at least as far as measurement goes. Beat the index they're benchmarked against. Charge you a fee for the effort and deliver more than you'd have got by simply owning the whole market. This page is the scoreboard on how often that actually happens, and it's the rare argument in this industry that comes with a decent long running dataset attached.
The figures come from SPIVA, the scorecard S&P Dow Jones has published twice a year since 2002, comparing active US large cap funds against the S&P 500 over horizons from one year out to twenty. What makes it worth using rather than a fund company's own marketing is that it counts the funds that died along the way. Funds that do badly tend to close or get merged into better performing siblings, so any comparison that only looks at what survived is flattering the category by construction. I've put the money side of the story on here too, because the two are connected. When index funds overtook active funds in total assets, it wasn't a mystery why.
One thing to watch as you read. There are two different share of the market numbers on this page and they're miles apart, because they measure different things. I've kept both and said which is which. I've also put two consecutive scorecards side by side, so you can see for yourself which horizons move between editions and which barely budge. Everything is dated, and the scorecards themselves are linked at the bottom if you want to open the original PDFs.
Over the twenty years to December 2025, the S&P 500 beat 92.89% of active US large cap funds. Over ten years it beat 85.59%, over five 88.96%, and over the single year 2025 it beat 78.78%, which S&P Dow Jones calls the fourth worst year for active large cap managers in SPIVA's twenty five year history. Index funds passed active funds in total assets in December 2023 and now hold 53.4% of long term fund assets, though they still own only about 19% of the whole US stock market.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 7 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 4 named sources, roughly 1150 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.