That’s part of the reason why returns for the average dollar invested in US mutual and exchange-traded funds reliably lag the returns of the products themselves. However, that difference may be shrinking, with the rolling 10-year average annual gap being about 1.7 percentage points in 2021 and 2022. “We’ve seen some improvements in the way fund investors access funds and the way they put them to work. Delta FarceSome categories stand out much more than others in terms of how the average dollar performed in comparison with average fund returns. The gap was lowest for US equity funds (0.4 percentage points) and highest for alternatives (1.6 percentage points), for example.