August proved the Dutch saying “The sting is in the tail”. Especially for the CTA strategies the last week of August was painful. A wide range of markets, mostly commodity markets, turned sharply down, destroying the performance of a couple of our funds. As CTA strategies are the largest allocation in the portfolio the impact on the final return was significant (luckily we see CTA’s rebounding during September).
All other strategies moved into positive territory for August. Multi strategy investments performed the best with a average return of more than 2%. The best performing fund (+7.7%) was Haidar. This fund is the smallest investment in our portfolio. This manager applies aggressive trading and arbitrage strategies on a wide range of bond-, currency- and credit markets.
Also a boutique global macro fund from Eastern Europe with a team of extremely talented fund managers was able to gain 1.3%, bringing the Year To Date result above 14%.
Despite the difficult environment for hedge funds this year we are outperforming our competitors with our uncorrelated returns with regards to stocks and bonds.
We think we are well positioned for the rest of the year to gain some positive momentum going forward.