The past few years have not always been easy for UK and European equity funds, but for a small group of them, consistence has been the defining characteristic regardless of what markets threw at them.
In this Trustnet series, we have identified funds that delivered first-quartile returns consecutively from 2023-2025 and have done so again in the first half of this year.
This article looks at the IA UK All Companies, IA Europe Including UK and IA Europe Excluding UK sectors.
IA UK All Companies
Starting with the UK market, the three funds in the table below met the performance criteria.
Source: FE Analytics
The strongest performer in the first half of 2026 was the JPM UK Equity Plus strategy, which gained 8% over the six months.
At £719.7m, it carries an FE fundinfo five-Crown Rating and is co-managed by FE fundinfo Alpha Manager Anthony Lynch alongside Callum Abbot. The strategy aims to provide long-term capital growth using both direct equity investments and derivatives and employing a bottom-up stock selection process alongside a blend of fundamental research and quantitative analysis.
Unlike its sister strategy – JPM UK Equity Core – JPM UK Equity Plus can short stocks deemed less attractive, allowing the managers to increase conviction in other stocks without increasing net market exposure.
Top holdings in the portfolio currently include HSBC (9.2%), AstraZeneca (7.8%) and Shell (7%).
JPM UK Equity Plus has been previously highlighted by Trustnet for managing to largely keep out of the bottom quartile. Earlier this year, it was also added to Bestinvest’s Best Funds list.
RSMR analysts said that the fund “could be used as a core proposition for a UK allocation, with investors gaining exposure to a strong performing team who can use more tools than a traditional fund”.
The only other actively managed fund to qualify from the IA UK All Companies sector also comes from JPMorgan.
JPM UK Dynamic is the smaller of the two at £384.1m but it matches its stablemate for pedigree, carrying a five-crown rating and an Alpha Manager, Blake Crawford, among its management team, alongside Jonathan Ingram and Victoria Helvert.
While many of its top holdings overlap with JPM UK Equity Plus, the top end of the portfolio also carries a more cyclical flavour, with Rolls-Royce and Rio Tinto in its top 10.
JPM UK Dynamic has served investors well over the long run, logging first-quartile returns over one, three and 10 years and gaining 133% over the decade.
The remaining fund in the table is the passively managed £11.7m First Trust United Kingdom AlphaDEX UCITS ETF, which tracks the NASDAQ AlphaDEX United Kingdom index, an equally weighted benchmark using fundamental growth and value factors to select stocks.
Performance of the funds vs sector over 5yrs
Source: FE Analytics
IA Europe Including UK
Looking across the wider continent, several funds in the IA Europe Including UK sector also met the outlined consistency criteria for this series.
Source: FE Analytics
MFS Meridian Blended Research European Equity is the strongest performer in the table so far in 2026, gaining 12.4% in the first half of the year.
At €1.2bn, it carries a five-crown rating and is co-managed by a four-man management team: James Fallon, Jed Stocks, Jonathan Safe and Matthew Krummell. It currently has a 26.1% overweight to the UK, compared with 22% for the benchmark.
The strategy blends proprietary fundamental and quantitative research with a bottom-up process, identifying above-average quality companies trading at favourable valuations with catalysts the managers expect to be rewarded over the long-term.
With top holdings currently including ASML, AstraZeneca and BNP Paribas, the fund has logged top-quartile returns over one, three, five and 10 years, gaining 212.1% over the decade.
Another fund in the table is the €7.6bn GS Goldman Sachs Europe CORE Equity Portfolio strategy, which currently has a 19.7% weighting to the UK, followed by France (17.7%), Germany (16.9%) and Switzerland (15.2%).
Co-managed by Alpha Manager Takashi Suwabe, Osman Ali and Len Ioffe, it targets capital appreciation and is designed to mirror the style, sector risk and capitalisation characteristics of the benchmark (MSCI Europe) while outperforming through stock and country selection.
GS Goldman Sachs Europe CORE Equity Portfolio currently holds over 180 stocks, with 23% of the fund’s assets invested in its top 10 holdings. It has a historical tracking error of 2.69%.
The only qualifying passive fund in this sector is the iShares STOXX Europe Equity Multifactor UCITS ETF.
At €812.5m, the exchange-traded fund (ETF) aims to reflect the return of the STOXX Developed Europe Equity Factor Screened index, combing capital growth and income.
Performance of the funds vs sector over 5yrs
Source: FE Analytics
IA Europe Excluding UK
Looking at European funds with no exposure to the UK, only one strategy managed to log top-quartile returns over the three consecutive years and again in 2026 to the end of June.
Amundi Prime Eurozone gained 17.3% in 2023, 4.9% in 2024, 31.5% in 2025 and 10.2% in the first six months of this year. It tracks the Solactive GBS Developed Markets Eurozone Large & Mid Cap index.