From Vanguard:
The Active-Passive Debate: Bear Market Performance
Time to dump those American Funds.
The Active-Passive Debate: Bear Market Performance
Conclusion
During periods of market stress, it is common to hear that active managers can help investors by selecting securities or by maintaining a significant cash position. However, our evidence does not support this. We have shown that actively managed funds, on average, tend to underperform a broad market benchmark. We have also demonstrated that past success does not ensure future success. While performance improves slightly when compared with style benchmarks, we again found little consistency with respect to outperformance. Finally, we discovered that despite some evidence of outperformance during bear markets, bull markets were significant challenges for active funds. Overall, this analysis concludes that while there will always be a group of funds that outperforms in every market cycle, consistently selecting those winning funds in advance is difficult at best. When accounting for the difficulties in identifying bear and bull markets, security selection, and the difficulty in overcoming higher costs over the long term, we conclude that an indexed investor is not at a disadvantage when investing in bear or bull markets.
Time to dump those American Funds.