Standard & Poor’s today released expanded results for the Standard & Poor’s Indices Versus Active Funds Scorecard (SPIVA) for Canada.

The report has been significantly expanded to include the following additional fund categories: Canadian dividend and income equity; Canadian income trust equity; international equity; global equity; and Canadian-focused equity.

“The SPIVA Scorecard was originally designed to provide an accurate, objective, and reliable assessment of the performance of actively managed mutual funds versus their relative style benchmark,” says Jasmit Bhandal, director at Standard & Poor’s. “The inclusion of these additional categories will provide asset managers, advisors, and retail investors with a level of detail needed to make more informed investment decisions.”

SPIVA reports the performance of actively managed Canadian mutual funds corrected for survivorship bias and shows equal- and asset-weighted peer averages.

In 2007, actively managed Canadian equity funds, and Canadian dividend and income equity funds lagged indices. Only 24.3% of Canadian equity funds beat the S&P/TSX Composite Index. In contrast, 51.8% of small/mid-cap equity funds outperformed the S&P/TSX SmallCap Index, while 37.0% of Canadian dividend and income funds beat the S&P/TSX Canadian Dividend Aristocrats Index.

Over longer time periods, indices continue to outperform a majority of domestic active funds. Over the past three years, only 13.3% of actively managed Canadian equity funds outperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index, while only 3.2% of active managers beat the S&P/TSX Canadian Dividend Aristocrats Index.

In the foreign equity categories for 2007, the majority of international, global equity, and U.S. equity funds underperformed relative to the S&P/Citigroup EPAC Index, S&P/Citigroup World Index, and the S&P 500 Index, respectively. Only 13.1%, 17.1%, and 14.9% of International equity, global equity, and U.S. equity funds outperformed over the past five years relative to their benchmarks. Three-year period results mirror this trend.

In the Canadian-focused equity category — which includes those funds with a predominantly Canadian allocation but also with foreign equity exposures — 51.6% of managers were able to outperform the index in this category over the one-year period, while in the three-year period only 40.5% were able to exceed the index return.

Survivorship over the five-year horizon is 61.9% for Canadian equity; 45.3%, U.S. equity; 60.7%, international equity; and 46%, global equity. In other words, a significant percentage of the funds in these four categories has been merged or liquidated over the past five years.

Fund categorizations are as defined by the Canadian Investment Funds Standards Committee (CIFSC), and fund data is drawn from Fundata’s mutual fund database.

The complete 2007 SPIVA scorecard for Canada is available on www.spiva.standardandpoors.com.