Managed funds and fees versus no load:
1) The relative statistic for measurement is total return after fees and taxes, ie: what you get to keep. If you are not data and tax savvy, probably difficult to get to a good answer. The first question which you should be most interested in is the maximum drawdown annually versus the SP500, which may impact your future as personally shown below. The financial questions/analysis for evaluation of portfolios at the end.
2) The most important information from the prospectus is the fund's goal and benchmark index.
If the fund is 100% equities against equity benchmarks, and long only, then probably won't be worth the expense, as the difficulty in beating the sp500 is very difficult for most.
If the fund is a special situations fund, long/short, then the fund is high risk and not worthy of anything than a small single percentage of thought for diversification, but has a better chance of beating the SP500, though not guaranteed.
3) IMO,
the primary reason to invest in a managed fund is to reduce your draw down in a market downturn.
Example, I had two more IRA withdrawals, the second one being all remaining, from my mom's sp500 indexed annuity. I took the first withdrawal in December 2022, when the market was down 20% or so. The loss of fund total value was two months of dementia care costs. The loss was also so big that after the withdrawal the recovery of the lost amount with the remaining funds was over a 50% return before the final withdrawal, just due to timing. If i could have avoid that loss, i would have been very appreciative. The only upside is that I paid total 1% (virtually zero) total taxes on both withdrawals.
4) I took a python course from a managed money / bank programmer, who showed us the code of the type of algorithms which the professional investors currently use. Many of these money managers are using machine learning (ML) to create high risk adjusted alpha (returns higher than their benchmark with high risk risk management scores, such as sharpe and sortino ratios).
5) Instead of buying load / managed funds, the better answer is to find an independent money manager, CTA designation, who uses ETF funds to create a custom portfolio for your risk tolerance, and rebalances at least quarterly and not annually. I have no information for CTAs.
6) Here is a sample of the JPM efficient 5 ETF portfolio which rebalances monthly. Yes there will be taxes, but you will probably a lower drawdown than the SP500, which should be the number one evaluation metric in retirement, as you have relatively little time to recover from lost values. The link pdf shows the "index" or the monthly return of the portfolio using the underlying allocation program of historical and actual returns.
https://www.jpmorgan.com/content/dam...Report_JPM.pdf
The information published is not timely enough to follow along yourself, but is a very good fund to benchmark any portfolio / fund manager's track record against.
Note, this portfolio invests in only a limited set of ETFs, with the weighting shown in the link pdf. JPM moves money between these ETFS based upon the program to determine risk level proportions.
good luck to us with retirement investments