Right, that's absolutely a problem, but it's orthogonal to the supposed problem that OP was mentioning (e.g., it could be that those funds are so bad that even

Right, that's absolutely a problem, but it's orthogonal to the supposed problem that OP was mentioning (e.g., it could be that those funds are so bad that even the top quartile doesn't outperform the index in a particular period). Or perhaps OP intended to refer to this problem, and it just wasn't done very clearly.