There are three primary reasons why emerging markets have been hot in 2016. First, a dovish Federal Reserve resulted in emerging market currency climbing. Second, Asian purchasing manager’s indexes signaled economic expansion by moving above the 50 level. Finally, commodity prices climbed just enough to help commodity exporting emerging markets, yet not quite enough to hurt commodity importing markets such as Asia.

But it's not just the iShares ETF being hurt by the cyclical change. Bloomberg Barclays EM USD Aggregate index gave back nearly 2% of total return between November 9 and November 10.