Active small caps and midcaps good bet in 2019

Active small-cap and midcap mutual funds had the greatest success against their benchmarks over the 12 months ended June 2019, according to S&P Global's most recent SPIVA Scorecard. Small-cap funds showed the greatest improvement over their record for the year 2018. About 36% of the funds failed to outperform their benchmarks, significantly lower than the 68% rate in 2018.

The improvement in relative performance was counter to the broad trend, where 71% of all funds studied failed to beat their respective indexes for the year ended June 30, up from 69% on Dec. 31.

Small caps perhaps had an easier target to hit, as the small-cap S&P 600 index fell 4.92% on a total return basis over time period, while the large-cap S&P 500 gained 10.4%. Year-to-date, the S&P 500 is up 25.5% compared with the 17.4% advance of the small-cap index.