Barclay CTA Index returns 7.09 per cent in first quarter despite fall in March

‘Nearly 57 percent of the CTAs on our platform were profitable in March,’ says BarclayHedge founder and president Sol Waksman. ‘This is a significant achievement, considering the abrupt price reversals in commodity markets on March 19, when crude oil dropped 4.5 percent and gold fell 5.9 percent in one day.’

Agricultural traders lost 3.51 per cent in March, according to BarclayHedge, while discretionary traders were down 0.91 per cent. ‘The challenge that agricultural traders face is that there are limited opportunities for diversification within an agricultural portfolio,’ Waksman says. ‘Although most grains have been in a sustained uptrend for the past 18 months, agricultural traders can still be hurt when prices across the sector drop suddenly.’

Although diversified traders lost 0.99 per cent in March, the sector index returned 13.92 per cent for the first three months of 2008. Barclay’s Currency Traders Index gained 0.56 per cent in March, and financial/metals traders rose 0.23 per cent.

‘Continued divergence between interest rates in the US and Europe has created profitable trading opportunities in the financial markets,’ Waksman says. ‘This interest rate divergence has also helped to drive the US dollar down, marking new lows against both the euro and the yen, and providing currency traders with opportunities to profit.’

The Barclay BTOP50 Index, which monitors the performance of the largest traders, slipped 0.52 per cent in March, but is still up 4.96 per cent for the quarter.

Founded as the Barclay Group in 1985, BarclayHedge tracks more than 6,600 hedge funds, funds of hedge funds and managed futures programmes and maintains 18 proprietary hedge fund and eight managed futures indices, providing data to clients including institutional investors, brokerage firms and private banks.