Introduction
2022 was a banner year in the Managed Futures space. Stocks and bonds both had a tough time, something that’s fairly rare. The S&P 500 Total Return Index returned -18.1%, the Nasdaq-100 Total Return Index fell -32.5%. The Nasdaq saw its high for the year on the opening day and the low a couple of days after Christmas. The Bloomberg US Agg Total Return Index returned -13.0%. The chart below illustrates how infrequent negative returns are in both asset classes.
If there was a year when a strong Managed Futures return would be most helpful, 2022 was it.
Below we will examine how investors use the asset class and review the key drivers of returns last year. We will then analyze the various quantitative approaches to trend following, how they explain dispersion among managers, and how they have performed historically and in 2022, when needed most.
Overview – Managed Futures
Many investors look at Managed Futures through a lens of absolute returns over economic cycles, uncorrelated to stock and bond markets. This lens looks at the broader range of markets available in Managed Futures – currencies and commodities typically – and both the long side and short side of return distributions available such that one isn’t reliant on prices always going up to generate positive returns. Either up or down is fine, as long as prices trend. Choppy sideways is bad.
Other investors look for Managed Futures as ‘Crisis Risk Offset’ strategies that they expect to generate returns during equity market declines and recessions, somewhat akin to put options or highly rated government bonds. This lens sees Managed Futures as capitalizing on flows that recessions and panics tend to coincide with – equity markets down, commodity markets down, flight to quality dynamics in currencies and fixed income.
In 2022 Managed Futures certainly delivered on both these counts, providing uncorrelated returns in the worst 60/40 market in decades.
In Part 1, we use the MLM Index EV methodology to examine how Managed Futures generated returns in 2022, looking in detail at the underlying market moves by asset class, highlighting some individual positions that contributed, and showing how some of the different approaches to Managed Futures impact returns. The MLM Index EV does a fine job at explaining and capturing the beta we believe exists in the space and using some different derivations in the parameters can offer some insight, particularly in big, interesting years.
In Part 2, we deconstruct Managed Futures returns into their contributing factors. Performance dispersion for any given Managed Futures strategy is generally driven by some combination of the following approaches by each manager:
- Volatility – the level of overall strategy volatility that is expected or targeted
- Trading speed – short, medium, long or blend lookback
- Trend approach – simple moving average, slope, crossover, breakout, etc.
- Market universe – more markets, less markets, alternative markets, sector allocation
- Position/Risk management – how positions are sized, rebalanced, and volatility adjusted
Of course there is more going on, but in the same way equity indices can be constructed to target different styles or factors like growth/value, low volatility or by sectors, Managed Futures returns can be somewhat deconstructed along the lines above. It can be useful to take a look in detail at how each of the changes impacts the nuances of Managed Futures results.
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