Actively managed portfolios are poised to outperform passive investments in the current market, according to a new research report from Boston Company Asset Management, an active-management company.
Following periods of extreme market distress, active management tends to do better than passive management, the company concluded. The study notes that 64% of all equity funds with reportable data have outperformed their benchmarks for the first five months of 2009, using Lipper data.

“The early part of 2009 appears similar to other periods that we have studied, where market distress has created exceptionally wide valuation spreads across the marketplace,” David Daglio, senior vice president of Boston Company Asset Management’s opportunistic value strategy, said in a statement. “During these periods, the good stock picker is able to select equities with historically low valuations and where fundamental recovery prospects have been ignored,” he said. Other similar periods cited by the company include 1974-1975, 1990-1991 and 2001-2002. “These periods of market distress have created wide dispersions within stock valuations,” Daglio said.

Boston Company Asset Management operates under the umbrella organization of BNY Mellon Asset Management, which is a unit of Bank of New York Mellon Corp.