Hedge funds

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.

Persistent trends across asset classes continued to fuel CTA returns over the recent weeks. According to several benchmarks of performance, January is on track to see them delivering the highest monthly returns in a decade!

Tim Haywood, investment director for absolute return fixed income strategies, shares his views on the current macroeconomic environment and opportunities in the bond markets.