Do actively managed funds ever beat the index?

Detailed Explanation

Yes, in particular periods and particular markets. The difficulty is consistency: sustaining outperformance across long horizons, net of fees, is much harder than achieving it once. That matters because you have to choose the fund in advance. Identifying which manager will outperform over the next twenty years is a different and harder problem than observing which one did over the last five. So the reasonable position is not that active management cannot work — it is that it requires a specific reason to believe this fund, in this market, justifies its cost.