"With more stability in the euro zone, as well as economic recovery in places like Japan, there has been a nice bounceback for international funds in both 2012 and 2013," says Todd Rosenbluth, director of mutual fund research for S&P Capital IQ.
One potential worry: Since international equities have notched some very impressive years, attractive values could get harder to find.
But fund managers say that despite the run-up, they are still managing to locate promising companies at the right price.
"Earnings growth has gone up a lot too, so price multiples have not actually changed very much," says Mark Yockey, one of the portfolio managers for $12.2 billion Artisan International Fund, another of this year's 2014 U.S. Lipper Fund Award winners.
Some of the top names in Yockey's portfolio: Chinese search engine Baidu Inc and German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG. The geographic split breaks down to 18 percent of holdings in German companies, 21 percent in the UK, 10 percent in Switzerland and 12 percent in Japan.
The result is 1-year returns of 18.27 percent, and eye-popping 5-year returns of 22.58 percent.
How has the fund managed such consistency, in foreign markets that can sometimes be wildly volatile? Yockey singles out the taste for long-term, secular investment trends which will not be altered by the headlines of the day.
"That could mean anything from the growth of the emerging-markets consumer, to environmental issues in Asia like cleaning up Chinese pollution, to expanded broadband around the world," he says.
Comparing Notes
The Thornburg and Artisan international funds offer an intriguing contrast in their approach to international investing, notes S&P Capital IQ's Rosenbluth.