TMPL (Temple Bar) is an excellent example of a trust (with a strong focus on value stocks) where past under-performance has recently come good and it is currently out-performing many of its peers.
Temple Bar has an annual return over 5 years of 7.96% whilst an iShares Global ETF (SWDA) has one of 12.77%, that's a lot of performance lost whilst you wait for the year Alastair gets it right. Annualised performance over 10 years is 7.88% for TMPL and 11.47% for SWDA. The NAV figures are worse for TMPL but price seems a fair comparison.
That's not to decry active management, but you need to constantly pick the very best managers if you wish to outperform something like a Global ETF.