About 33 years ago I decided to move a portion of my stock investing to several mutual funds which I had researched carefully. They had respected management and low fees. But as soon as I bought them each began to lag my expectations.
Around that time I had been reading about the new and little known index funds created by John Bogle at Vanguard. For a year or two I compared the performance of my managed funds with Vanguard's index fund. Consistently the index fund beat my managed funds every quarter, and by a fair margin. Never once did one of my four managed funds come out on top for a three-month period. It was eye-opening; soon I bought into my first index fund.
But friends laughed at me "for accepting mediocre performance."
Since then, all my mutual fund investments have been index funds, mainly S&P 500 but also the QQQ NASDAQ 100 index which has performed spectacularly in recent years.
If your managed funds are keeping up, that may be because many funds nowadays are "closet indexers." That is, their portfolio is very similar to the S&P 500. But they will lag eventually due to their higher fees.
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