Top 10 Holdings of Our Ultimate Stock-Pickers' Index

Fund investors would like to see the manager of the actively managed funds they own beat the market every year, but they've been left wanting for well over a decade. The lack of consistent outperformance by large-cap active managers (the main contributors to the Ultimate Stock-Pickers concept) has been well documented by the S&P Indices Versus Active Funds (SPIVA) U.S. Scorecard. For the five years ending June 2020, the index group noted that 77.97% of large-cap managers had lagged the S&P 500. The results over this five-year period have been similar across all investing styles. A measly 6.9% of large-cap core managers have outperformed their index over the past five years versus 19% of large-cap value managers and 38.5% of large-cap growth managers. (We'll note this analysis is performed on an after-fees basis.)

Although five-year results have been lacking for active management, about 38.5% of large-cap growth funds have still managed to outperform the S&P 500 benchmark. We saw a marked improvement in managers' results in the large-cap value category, which overperformed compared with 2019. Despite the improvement, the value strategy does not remain close to its strong performance posted in 2017 and 2018. Morningstar's large-cap index (MLCP) has posted year-to-date returns of 16.48%.