Over the past 10 years, the UK market has endured one of its most turbulent periods in modern times – from the political shockwaves of Brexit to the Covid-19 era collapse and rebound, with more recent years headlined by sticky inflation and spiking interest rates.
Despite the rapidly shifting landscape, a select group of funds still managed to outperform the FTSE All Share for most of the decade.
Trustnet analysed the discrete calendar-year returns of funds in the IA UK All Companies and IA UK Equity Income sectors and compared them against the annual performance of the FTSE All Share. We then identified which funds beat the index most frequently between 2016 and 2025.
IA UK All Companies
Over 60 funds in the IA UK All Companies sector outperformed the FTSE All Share in at least five out of 10 years. This narrowed to eight funds when identifying those that managed to outperform in seven years.
As shown in the table below, all eight funds beat the index in 2024, 2021 and 2017.
Source: FE Analytics. Figures highlighted in red represent years in which a fund underperformed the FTSE All Share.
Despite their collective long-term consistency, annual performance varied significantly. The £1.4bn Artemis SmartGARP UK Equity topped the whole sector in 2025, closely followed by Dimensional UK Value. The year prior, Artemis UK Select posted a 25.3% return, topping the peer group – having been the second-best performer in 2023 behind Ninety One UK Special Situations.
In contrast, none of the eight funds appeared in the sector’s top 10 between 2018 to 2020 – a period which coincided with a global sell-off, prolonged Brexit uncertainty and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic – with Dimensional UK Value, Artemis SmartGARP UK Equity and Artemis UK Select each falling into the fourth quartile for returns in one or more of those three years.
The popular Artemis SmartGARP UK Equity fund is managed by longstanding FE fundinfo Alpha Manager Philip Wolstencroft and utilises the firm’s SmartGARP quantitative framework to identify undervalued companies with improving fundamentals.
RSMR analysts noted that its value tilt and heavier mid-cap weighting means the fund provides diversification to strategies that are more growth or large-cap oriented.
It has delivered the strongest 10-year return of the eight funds, gaining 241.3% – almost 50 percentage points more than the next best 10-year return from the £5.1bn Artemis UK Select fund.
Artemis UK Select has also demonstrated its resilience. In 2020, it was the only fund of the eight to make money, gaining 5.7% while the FTSE All Share lost 9.8%.
Its consistency has been rewarded, as it features on Bestinvest’s Favourite Funds list and was the most purchased fund by Bestinvest clients in February 2026.
It was the only actively managed fund in the IA UK All Companies sector to attract more than £500m in new money from investors in 2025.
The fund, which has been co-managed by Alpha Manager Ed Legget and Ambrose Faulks since 2015, is also popular among other fund selectors, who highlighted its value-focused, bottom-up, stock picking process that leans into recovery stories and mispriced opportunities.
Meanwhile, the smaller £296.6m Dimensional UK Value fund was one of only two funds in the table to beat the index in 2016 – gaining 20.7%.
It takes a systematic route, with the management team applying academic research to capture long-term drivers of returns rather than relying on traditional stock picking.
As such, the strategy currently tilts toward value and small-cap factors, maintaining broad diversification with more than 200 holdings and ensuring consistent exposure to value premium while controlling risk and trading costs.
Last year, it was also identified as having one of the highest information ratios in the sector over five years.
Of course, not all funds in the sector have a 10-year track record. Some of the younger funds have logged impressive gains against the FTSE All Share – for example, HSBC UK Multi-Factor Equity beat the FTSE All Share in four out of five possible years.
IA UK Equity Income
As shown in the table below, five funds in the IA UK Equity Income sector outperformed the FTSE All Share in seven of the past 10 years.
Source: FE Analytics. Figures highlighted in red represent years in which a fund underperformed the FTSE All Share.
As well as being the only fund to outperform the FTSE All Share in 2017, Man Income Fund also delivered the strongest return in the IA UK Equity Income sector in that year, gaining 27.6%, while Schroder Income led the sector in 2021 with a 29.5% gain.
However, the cohort also faced more challenging periods. Jupiter UK Income, Schroder Income and Schroder Income Maximiser posted fourth-quartile losses during the 2019 to 2020 period. They also failed to beat the index in those years, with BNY Mellon UK Income the only fund to lose less than the FTSE All Share in 2020.
Man Income Fund ultimately delivered the strongest return in the sector over a decade, posting a 191.2% 10-year return.
The £2.4bn fund features on AJ Bell’s Favourite Funds list, with analysts highlighting its “disciplined valuation investment approach” and the management team’s “level pragmatism that allows the fund to navigate through a variety of market conditions”.
It has been managed by FE fundinfo Alpha Manager Henry Dixon since 2013. Dixon was joined at the helm by fellow Alpha Manager Jack Barrat in October 2025.
The £1.2bn Schroder Income fund posted the third-best 10-year return in the sector, gaining 173.4%.
It has previously been identified as one of the funds in the sector with the highest average decile scores for the three years to the end of 2025. It also made first-decile returns over those three years.
Despite its strong long-term track record, it is important to note that much of its performance occurred under the management of Kevin Murphy and Nick Kirrage, who have both since left Schroders to join Brickwood Asset Management and Brown Shipley respectively. It is now co-managed by Tom Grady and Andrew Lyddon.
The fund was subsequently dropped from Hargreaves Lansdown’s Wealth Shortlist, with the investment platform noting that conviction in the fund was based on Kirrage’s skill set, capabilities and experience.
Hargreaves Lansdown also removed Jupiter UK Income from the list in 2024, following the departure of former manager Ben Whitmore, who went to launch his own value boutique firm. He was succeeded by former GAM duo Adrian Gosden and Chris Morrison – who have over 50 years of investment experience between them.
The fund invests in a portfolio of 45 to 60 names, with a focus on the underlying businesses’ free cashflow generation and how this drives the ability of companies to pay sustainable and growing dividends over time.