January 2016 was a good month for CTA / Managed Futures managers. The equity markets had one of the worst starts ever and commodity markets also faced significant losses (again). In these markets with clear downtrends the CTA / managed futures strategies normally perform well. We as manager of the multi strategy fund with a +50% allocation to those strategies regret the recovery in the last trading days of the month: both oil price and equity markets had a sharp recovery. Oil moved up from the bottom by 20% and the equity markets regained a 4%. This had is impact on some of our greatest performing positions: their intra-month results came down from almost 20% to a more modest average of 3,5%. For the Equity Long / Short managers the times were much more difficult.
The fund performed in January well compared to our benchmarks, global equity (-7.5%) and the Barclay Hedge Fund Index (-2.34%). Since the start of the fund we outperformed the equity markets by 5% and our hedge fund benchmark by 2.6%. Last month it was also good to see that the core of our portfolio, CTA / Managed Futures, outperformed the HFR CTA index. The HFR CTA index won 2.6% while our selection of CTA funds performed 3.8. So far world wide equity markets are almost 15% down during 2016 (until 9 February) and the fund was capable to fulfil its promise to deliver uncorrelated returns.