How The Largest Actively Managed Mutual Funds From 15 years Ago Performed

You can't go long without reading an article about the death of active management. Somewhere in a discussion like that you will also hear that the larger a fund gets the more likely it is to under-perform. My purpose of this post is not to get into either of those issues but I thought it would be interesting to take a glimpse back in time to the largest funds of 1999 (15 years ago).

For this exercise I decided to screen for the largest actively managed funds 15 years ago (8/1999) which had the S&P 500 as their prospectus benchmark. The top 10 results looked like this

So how did they do? Were they too big to outperform?

Indeed, the largest fund did manage to under-perform. However, as a whole, these large funds did quite well. Over the last 15 years the largest 10 funds which were benchmarked to the S&P 500 managed to return an average of 5.47% compared to 4.47% for the S&P 500.

What's also interesting is that despite the fact that I compared them all to their prospectus benchmark of the S&P 500, a few of them tend to have a known growth tilt (Vanguard Primecap, Growth Fund of America, Fidelty Contrafund) but they all managed to significantly beat the S&P 500 despite the fact that growth significantly underperformed the S&P during this time (Russell 1000 Growth returned only 3.18% compared to 4.47% on the S&P 500).