Industry Benchmark Performance A nasty month for most equity programs, but year-to-date returns are still positive. Futures are mixed with smaller losses but smaller 2019 gains. Bonds have had the biggest rally, but it’s not enough to offset all the other uncertainty. Blogs and Recent Publications Find this at the end of this report. We post new interviews and reference new articles each … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance More small gains for hedge funds, putting the overall index up by 6.35% for 2019, slightly lower than our trend performance. Equity Long, however, is higher by 9.9% for 2019, showing that taking advantage of the upwards bias in stocks pays off. CTA’s search for a trend has some good results, with the BTOP 50 up 4.92% and the SG Trend Index up 7.13%. Both of those … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance Hedge funds posted fractional gains but are still nicely position for the first quarter. If they can maintain this rate of return, investors will see a good year. CTAs are also gaining slightly, bringing some of the year-to-date returns positive, but not the BTOP50, which we see as the benchmark. Interest rates are the center of profits this year, as expectations of … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance Early reporting shows that the hedge fund index is lagging the broad market S&P although the long-only programs are tracking about 3% behind. Most of the other equity funds posted modest gains. Futures programs, including ours, continue to search for trends that are not there. Many of the funds broke even for February, a better result than January. We keep … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance Early reporting shows that hedge funds posted gains in all categories with Equity Long up 4.96% and Multi Strategy up a healthy 9.61%. The benchmark broad index markets also posted very good gains, ranging from up 8% to up 11%. This is all a welcome bounce from lows of more than 20% in many of the sectors, but still well off from the highs. Futures started the … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance Early reporting shows that hedge funds, in general, performance on a par with the SPY, the broad index. Long-only equity programs, similar to ours, fared worse, although our benchmark 10-stock portfolio netted a gain for 2018. Futures did better, with the CTA index posting fractional gains. The SG Trend Index, a more realistic measure, shows trend systems down … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance Early reporting shows gains for equities and losses for futures. We expect that equities will get better as more funds report, but futures continue to decline. Without even analyzing the markets, we know that interest rates have stopped declining and stocks have made a reversal from the downside. Both of those patterns do not help trend-following, which is the basis … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance We expected October to be volatile, but it took a bigger toll on the overall market, and our programs, than we had expected. Early reporting of funds tends to be the better results, so we expect larger losses than are shown in the industry summary below. All except the equity multi-strategy programs are posting net losses for 2018, and even those results might … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance An uninspiring month shows mostly losses and a few marginal gains in both equity and futures programs for the Industry. Given that the major equity index markets are up 10% to 20%, it’s a disappointing performance. The problem is that capturing the trend isn’t as easy as looking at a chart after-the-fact. We expect the 4th quarter to be better, as we show in our … [Read more...]

Industry Benchmark Performance Early reporting of equity long programs shows that a new leg in the bull market translates into hedge fund gains. All the funds that we follow posted profits in August, but year-to-date still lags the passive indices by a long way. CTAs had a much better month, allowing them to reduce losses. The last quarter of the year tends to be good for trading, so the final … [Read more...]