[awinder]

You would compare your fund to an index maintained by a company like MSCI or S&P Global which covers Fictionaland. And you’d probably have a number of indexes for Fictionaland that could match depending on how your fund is composed.

You can compare Fictionaland funds to the S&P 500 and this can be a useful exercise. But you can’t determine if your Fictionaland fund is “good” unless you compare to a representative index — this is one with overlap of securities, but with likely different weights from the underlying index. And you’re going to have peer funds by other companies with slightly different methodologies, you’ll all compare to the same index, and your relative performance amongst competitors will mostly determine if you’re doing good.

Edit: I missed the management/performance question. If you run an ETF you are going to report holdings frequently, typically every day. If you run a mutual fund it’ll be less often, like every 60-90 days. So over time, you’ll be able to understand a bit about the trading methodology.