The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that the vast majority of actively managed Canadian equity funds underperformed their benchmark indexes in the first half of 2026, according to a report by index provider S&P Dow Jones Indices. The Globe's Andrew Galbraith writes that underperformance occurred despite a growing gap between winning and losing stocks, which may have created more opportunities for active investors to outperform, the S&P Indices Versus Active scorecard showed. Over the first six months of the year, 87 per cent of Canadian active equity funds underperformed the S&P/TSX Composite TXCX, Canada's broadest equity index. That number was "well above" the 81.8-per-cent average over each of the past 10 calendar years, the report said. On both an equal-weight and asset-weighted basis, actively managed equity funds returned an average of 8.8 per cent over the first six months of the year, against 11.2 per cent for the TSX Composite Index. The underperformance of equity funds came as dispersion levels -- the gap between winning and losing stocks -- rose in both Canadian and international indexes. It can be hard mathematically to reliably pick winning stocks when they are in the minority.