Stats › Active, passive and flows › SPIVA global
Active management around the world
You've heard the claim a thousand times. Active fund managers can't beat the index, so just buy the index. In the US that claim rests on some of the most solid evidence in the whole of finance. What it doesn't rest on is much data from anywhere else, and people repeat it globally as though the US result travels automatically.
This page checks. It's the SPIVA scorecard results from outside the US, covering 11 regions for the first half of 2025, and the headline is unremarkable: 54% of equity funds lost to their benchmark, the same rate as US large cap funds over the identical period. Underneath that average is where it gets interesting. In South Africa 92% of domestic funds underperformed. In Brazil 17% did. That's a 75 point gap between two real markets in the same six months, and out of 17 reported domestic categories, six saw most active managers beat their benchmark.
There's a section here on why the spread is so wide, because the explanations are structural rather than mysterious, and one on what all this does and doesn't do to the case for indexing. I'd flag the biggest caveat right at the top rather than bury it: this is six months of data, and six month figures move a lot between editions. Two sources with dates below, plus a note on what the summary document does and doesn't publish. If you need a specific country, go to that country's own scorecard rather than to me.
Across 11 regions in the first half of 2025, 54% of all equity funds underperformed their benchmarks, the same rate as US large cap funds over the same period. But the regional variation is extreme. In South Africa 92% of domestic funds underperformed the S&P South Africa 50, while in Brazil only 17% underperformed the S&P Brazil LargeCap. Majority underperformance appeared in 11 of 17 reported domestic fund categories, meaning six markets saw most active managers beat their benchmark.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 2 named sources, roughly 1400 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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