Three funds dominate the emerging markets ex-China conversation right now, and each one has put meaningful daylight between itself and the S&P 500 so far this year. iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ex China ETF (NASDAQ:EMXC) is up 39% year to date, Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF (NYSEARCA:FRDM) is up 41%, and Columbia EM Core ex-China ETF (NYSEARCA:XCEM) is up 36%. The S&P 500, by comparison, is up roughly 9% over the same stretch.
The spread is wide enough that the headline gap of about 30 percentage points holds across all three funds. Each one carves up the same underlying idea differently: own India, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, and a handful of other developing markets without holding the Chinese names that have historically dictated the direction of broad emerging market indexes.
Why the ex-China cut is getting attention
Standard emerging market benchmarks still allocate close to 30% of their weight to China, which means broad EM funds tend to move with sentiment toward Beijing as much as with growth in any other developing economy. Carving China out reshapes the country mix toward Taiwan, India, and South Korea, with Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Mexico filling out the rest.
Performance dispersion across emerging markets has been unusually wide. Morningstar’s data through September 2025 showed South Korea up more than 55% for the year and South Africa up about 42%, while India had given back most of its 2024 gains. Funds that pull China out of the equation can lean harder into those country stories.
EMXC: the cap-weighted default
As the reference vehicle for the ex-China trade, this fund tracks the MSCI Emerging Markets ex China Index with total assets reaching $24.42 billion. It offers a sprawling, diversified reach across the developing world with 650 individual holdings and over 254 million shares currently in circulation. Since its inception on July 18, 2017, the strategy has become the de facto standard for investors looking to prune their portfolios of specific geographic risks.
The investment logic for EMXC is straightforward. It is large, liquid, cap-weighted, and benchmarked to a benchmark that institutional allocators already use, which means an investor can carve out China from an EM sleeve without changing methodology or factor exposures elsewhere in the portfolio. Top weights skew toward Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics, Reliance Industries, and ICICI Bank, giving the fund concentrated exposure to the Taiwan and Korea chip complex and to India’s largest private-sector companies.
Costs are competitive at a 0.25% expense ratio, with a trailing twelve-month dividend yield of 1.9%. The fund trades at a 19 price-to-earnings ratio with a beta of 0.89, both lower than the S&P 500. Over the past year, EMXC has returned 64%, with a 52-week range of $62 to $107. The trade-off is the one that comes with any market-cap-weighted index: Taiwan and Korea dominate the country mix because their largest companies are very large, so the fund is essentially a semiconductor and India consumer bet wearing an EM label.
FRDM: the freedom-screened alternative
Unlike its peers, this fund deploys a unique country-level filter that moves the needle beyond mere market cap. By anchoring its index weightings to the Life + Liberty index, it systematically walls off authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia that fail the test on civil liberties and rule-of-law metrics. The result is a specialized mandate for investors who want to capture high-growth EM exposure while strictly avoiding the political risks tied to autocracy.
The expense ratio is 0.49%, roughly double EMXC’s, reflecting both a smaller asset base and an active country-screening overlay. Year to date, FRDM has slightly outpaced EMXC at 41%, and its one-year return of 82% sits well ahead of the other two ex-China funds.
The mechanics of the freedom screen mean that FRDM tends to overweight Taiwan, South Korea, Chile, and Poland while excluding commodity-heavy authoritarian markets. The tradeoff is concentration and methodology risk. The country list can shift as freedom scores change, and the fund is smaller and less liquid than EMXC, which matters for larger allocations.
XCEM: the older methodology alternative
As a pioneer in the ex-China space, this vehicle predates its peers by tracking Columbia Threadneedle’s proprietary Beta Advantage index. While it shares the familiar DNA of cap-weighted, broad-based diversification, the internal mechanics diverge from the standard MSCI blueprint. This creates a distinctive country and sector footprint at the margin, giving savvy allocators a way to capture growth without blindly mirroring the broader market.
Year to date, XCEM has returned 36%, trailing both EMXC and FRDM but still well ahead of the S&P 500. The one-year return is 58%, and the case for XCEM is mostly a diversification one. Allocators who already hold EMXC and want a second ex-China sleeve with non-overlapping index methodology can pair the two without doubling up on the exact same benchmark. The tradeoff is that XCEM is smaller and less heavily traded than EMXC, so bid-ask spreads can be wider during volatile sessions.
Choosing between the three
The three funds answer slightly different questions. EMXC is the default for an investor who wants the cleanest, largest, cheapest cap-weighted ex-China sleeve and is comfortable with a portfolio dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung, and the Indian large caps. FRDM fits an investor who wants the China carve-out plus an additional value-based screen and is willing to pay roughly twice the expense ratio for it. XCEM works best as a complement to EMXC rather than a replacement, giving allocators a second methodology to spread benchmark risk.
For a broader context, pairing any of these with country-specific funds like the iShares Korea or Taiwan ETFs can tilt exposure further toward the semiconductor complex, while a position in a frontier or single-country India fund can lean into the demographic story that Goldman Sachs and Franklin Templeton highlighted in their 2026 outlooks.
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