S&P does a great job of reporting performance on the mutual fund industry as they scrub their data to account for mutual funds that were closed or merged. Fund companies tend to close or merge underperforming funds.
Outperformance is rare especially over several years. Over 5 years 84% of large cap managers, 85% of mid cap manager and 91% of small cap manager underperformed their S&P benchmarks!
file:///C:/Users/JRI/Downloads/spiva-us-year-end-2017.pdf
Equally dreadful, few funds show persistence of strong performance. Fund’s record of staying in the top quartile is generally lower than change would suggest. Over the past five year period no large cap, mid cap, or small cap funds managed to remain in the top quartile through out measurement period:
file:///C:/Users/JRI/Downloads/persistence-scorecard-december-2017.pdf