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FUND PERFORMANCE
London-based commodities-focused hedge fund Westbeck Capital Management has seen its flagship strategy surge in recent weeks, as oil prices continue to trend upwards.
The Westbeck Energy Opportunity Fund finished February up 32.8 per cent, and is maintaining its positive momentum in March as oil prices regain pre-pandemic levels and oil equities rebound.
The strategy, which launched in 2016, trades oil markets using a long/short directional approach across equities, futures and options. Oil equities, oil futures – both long and short – oil options and emissions all contributed positively to March’s returns, which was the fund’s best monthly performance since April
SURVEY
A majority of investors now believe hedge funds are best placed to enhance the performance of a traditional 60/40 equities and bonds portfolio, with the prevailing rate environment driving a “sense of urgency” among allocators to tap into new sources of returns, a new Credit Suisse survey has found.
The bank’s 2021 Hedge Fund Investor Survey, titled ‘A New Dawn’, quizzed more than 200 institutional investors, collectively representing USD800 of hedge fund investments globally. Survey participants – which included pensions, endowments, foundations, consultants, private banks, family offices, and funds of hedge funds – were probed on strategy preferences, allocation plans,
SOCIAL IMPACT
A social impact real estate fund run by London-based alternative asset manager Cheyne Capital has made a “real impact on individual lives”, an independent audit by King’s College London’s Policy Institute has found.
FUND PERFORMANCE
The hedge fund industry gathered further momentum during February, as managers generated positive performances across the strategy spectrum, with equities, macro, commodities, activist and cryptocurrency strategies generating particularly strong gains, new industry data shows.
Amid rapidly-evolving developments on vaccinations, energy policy, and inflation rises, Hedge Fund Research’s main Fund Weighted Composite index surged 4.05 per cent in February, and is now up 5.35 per cent since the start of 2021. Meanwhile, the investable HFRI 500 Fund Weighted Composite Index rose 2.22 per cent last month, and has generated 2.06 per cent during the first two months of the year, according
BONDS
Last month the fear of inflation in the US economy reared its head. Yields on 1-year US Treasury securities bounced higher from a low of 5.6 basis points on 19 February to 8.9 basis points by close of play on 25 February. For 2-year Treasuries, they went from 10.9 basis points to 16.8 basis points.
FUND PERFORMANCE
Managed futures hedge funds and short-term trading strategies have rebounded strongly in recent weeks, with each of Société Générale’s three main CTA and trend-following indices finishing February in positive territory.
FUND PERFORMANCE
Paris-based systematic CTA specialist Metori Capital’s Lyxor Epsilon Global Trend Fund is building long positions across US and UK fixed income, US and Japanese equities, and in the euro at the start of 2021, having generated a strong annual double-digit gain last year amid extreme market conditions and record volatility.
The long-running managed futures strategy – which invests across equity indices, short-term rates, government bonds and currencies in both developed and emerging markets, using a hybrid investment style combining global macro and quant trend following – advanced 10.8 per cent annually in 2020, with 7.1 per cent volatility.
The fund’s assets
SURVEY
With shares in heavily-shorted real estate services firm Rocket surging more than 70 per cent this week, a new study by London-based AI start-up causaLens explores the ways in which so-called ‘meme’ stocks, popular with online amateur traders, could potentially face short squeezes.
PODCAST
Retail platforms, led by Amazon, have revolutionized how we behave as consumers and placed convenience and quality of customer service at the centre of the model. How can asset management firms take lessons from this and could there be a way forward for them to adopt more of a platform-centric way to providing fund services? And in doing so, harness the power of the platform to re-think fund distribution and bring a sense of order to the highly fragmented, chaotic nature of global asset management?
PODCAST
In this podcast produced by Hedgeweek, in association with SEI, we examine how asset managers need to carefully engineer the way they optimise alternative data, in order to generate incremental insights to support their investment programmes.
