14/03/2010 Author: Zaki Abushal

February figures ease hedge funds' early-year woes

Early-year trading has been a real chore for most, but there was something of a turnaround in February.

The fact that markets stabilised toward the end of the month and hedge fund returns showed improvements right at the beginning of February is a measure of the industry’s recovery  after a poor January.

By and large, CTAs’ returns were still between the haves and have nots. Of the systematic CTAs, Winton Evolution Fund returned more than 3% through to 24 February, sneaking the fund into positive territory for the year, and Bluetrend was up 1% to 19 February, while on the discretionary side, the Clive Fund returned 1.78%.

Despite some positives, a lot of funds flirted with good returns but, on average, large losses marked the category down once again; Rotella Polaris fell 4.4% through the 19 February, Eagle Global Fund was down 3.84% and Digilog dropped 3.27% for the same period.