Despite the popular disclaimer that past performance is not indicative of future results, many investors, advisors and even 401k plans still use recent market outperformance as a determining metric in picking investments. In theory, the strategy of chasing performance would work if actively managed mutual funds had been able to exhibit any historical ability to persist in their outperformance. But history has instead shown that a top-performing mutual fund is more likely to end up either closing, merging, or ending up in the bottom half of performers than to continue outperforming its benchmark. In Quantifying the Impact of Chasing Fund Performance Vanguard demonstrates that a buy-and-hold strategy has significantly outperformed a performance-chasing strategy.