Everyone:
Lets not confuse mutual fund/investment selection with "investment planning"!
There's a big difference!
First, too much emphasis is on who has the better mutual fund. This is a non factor, because no one knows for sure.
The focus should be on determining your risk tolerance, developing an asset allocation portfolio, Define the time frame and objective of your goals, Plan for any tax savings with your investments, How will you manage, monitor, and make changes too your portfolio? You need to develop an Investment Policy Statement too.
Once this is done, research what type of investments you want to make up your portfolio...stocks & bonds, or mutual funds, or ETFs, etc.
Should you use only index funds, active managed funds, or both?
Most people have been burned on their investments, not because they owned an S&P 500 fund, an active managed fund, or a broker sold fund. They just didn't have a proper investment plan set up.
You can't compare any broker sold fund to a no load fund or an active fund to a index fund.
The reason is that one uses a broker sold fund for advice and to prepare an investment plan. They don't want to do it themselves.
If you are a do it yourselfer, you need to do your own investment plan.
There are pros & cons to index funds & active managed funds. You your belief is indexing is the way to go, then compare index funds...not managed funds. If you believe in managed funds make the right comparison. Perhaps a combination is appropriate.
I have seen a lot of people who use financial advisors and their portfolio is 100% growth. In most cases, that is not a proper asset allocation. Therefore, the issue is not which growth fund(s) this investor owns (is it an index fund, managed fund or other is irrelevant), but why isn't an investment plan in place?
No one is doing there money any good when they fail to have an investment plan in place and focus too much on irrelevant issues.