Alternative

Unstable market conditions were supportive for hedge funds, in relative terms. Liquid hedge fund benchmarks were down -1% in March, with Distressed and Special Situations strategies underperforming. On a positive note, low beta strategies did well.

We think it is time to strengthen L/S Neutral funds allocation. While they faced months of challenging transversal stock rotations, we expect their environment to improve for several reasons.

We maintain an overweight stance on Fixed Income Arbitrage, a strategy that has delivered attractive returns on a risk adjusted basis in the past and provides protection against rising bond yields. In the L/S Equity space, we prefer U.S. funds compared to European funds.

The return of market volatility in February hurt equity markets significantly. For the first time in 15 months, the MSCI World ended the month in the red, down -3.5%, as EMU and Japanese markets underperformed.

Hedge funds strongly recovered from the selloff, with only two exceptions: i) the fixed income funds, flat this week, still isolated from the epicenter, and ii) neutral equity funds, still suffering from sector and factor rotations. This week, we checked if the selloff altered the stock-pickers and trend-followers environments.