Active emerging market funds have faced a challenging time when trying to beat the market even over the long term, as an FE Trustnet study earlier today showed that they have tended to significantly underperform the index over 10-year periods. 
When we looked at the 22 quarterly 10-year periods that span 1 January 2001 to 31 December 2010 and 1 April 2006 to 31 March 2016, we found that the average IA Global Emerging Markets fund failed to beat the MSCI Emerging Markets index in every one of them.
Nine funds did not beat the index in any of these periods. What’s more, the average 10-year underperformance of four of them was in excess of 70 percentage points; the worst performer lagged the index by an average of 107.99 percentage points.
Adrian Lowcock, head of investing at AXA Wealth, argued that the situation has got better recently, as a number of emerging market funds that did not have the track record to be included in our study have learnt from lessons of the past and look like promising prospects.
However, we did manage to identify five emerging market equity funds that have managed to consistently beat the MSCI Emerging Markets index for long-term investors and we reveal them in the following pages.
