Cookie Policy Bankrate uses cookies to ensure that you get the best experience on our website. Your Watchlist is empty. Clearly, opting to just stick with low-fee index funds is extremely reasonable, and will likely have your portfolio outperforming most managed funds. With an inception date of , this fund is another long-tenured player. Because of this approach, index funds are considered a type of passive investing, rather than active investing where a manager analyzes stocks and tries to pick the best performers. So you might instead opt for mutual funds that aim for above-average returns — but that might be even harder to do, because the vast majority of managed stock funds fail to do as well as their benchmark indexes.