I think what everyone is saying here is that it is impossible to predict the future. The best you can do when determining a potential fund to invest in is to conduct extensive due diligence. Look at the tenure of the portfolio manager, what is the risk of the portfolio? i.e. standard deviation & beta vs. benchmark, what is the annualized rate of return vs. the appropriate benchmark? What are the internal fees and are they enough to outperform the fund’s benchmark? The idea is to invest in funds that have low correlation to one another so that you are capturing as much Alpha as possible to offset any underperforming asset classes. If you feel one asset class’ funds can never beat it’s benchmark than buy the index or employ a core/satellite strategy utilising index funds as your core holding and add high alpha active managers to beat the index. Make sure to conduct due diligence on any index funds as well. There are many issues with index funds for example, many funds have significant tracking error, many have high internal expenses and many do not report the trading costs within the funds.
