Macro Hedge Funds Top Peers in January After Years of Struggle

(Bloomberg) -- Finally, when the going got tough, macro managers showed up in January -- emerging as the standout winners in a month beset by turbulence across both Treasury and equity markets. 

Although many of the biggest players are coming off a decade of mostly underwhelming performance, they've since rejiggered their books and made money when so many others lost. 

Among January's macro winners were Trend Capital Management, a $900 million firm that wagered on an increase in short-term U.S. rates, fueling an 8.9% gain for the month, according to people familiar with the matter. Castle Hook Partners, Kirkoswald Asset Management and Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund, also posted gains. 

“If macro managers were focused on fixed income or rates, they likely repositioned to be short the front of the curve, which explains their gains,” said Tim Ng, senior consultant at Fiducient Advisors, referring to the wager that shorter-term rates are likely to rise as the Federal Reserve tightens policy more quickly.

They made money when short-dated Treasury yields, which had already climbed early in the month, rocketed even higher in late January amid expectations that the Fed would have to be more aggressive in its tightening. 

Trend Capital placed its wager late last year, believing that the December meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee “was particularly hawkish, but the market rallied,” the firm's founder, Ashwin Vasan, said Thursday in an interview. 

“We thought ‘My goodness, this pricing does not make any sense,'” said Vasan, 59. So he boosted the firm's short bet on the eurodollar contract, wagering that short-term U.S. interest rates would rise faster than the market expected. “It was definitely our largest position in our portfolio.”

Read more: Hedge Funds Flood Short-End of Treasury Curve With Sales

“Macro funds were disappointing last year because of their inability to traverse very large market price moves across many asset classes within a very short time frames,” Ng said. “It's very hard for them to change direction quickly, and so they were caught on the wrong side of many trades.” 

But a month like January, when investors accepted the idea that inflation is no longer transitory and will settle at a higher level than where it has been for several years, provides a much clearer path for U.S. and U.K. monetary policies and greatly benefits macro managers, he said. 

The so-called steepener Treasury trade -- where hedge funds bet that the difference between short-dated and longer-dated yields will increase -- also may have fallen out of favor as the yield curve flattened last year, inflicting pain on some of the industry's biggest firms. When such wagers fail, money managers get hit on both sides of the trade, while a directional bet on just one side is safer.

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For much of the past decade, the macro strategy has languished -- with managers blaming a lack of market volatility and not enough stock-price dispersion to generate solid returns. 

Meanwhile, the range in multistrategy performance last month was wide. Ken Griffin's Citadel came out on top, with its flagship Wellington fund as well as its fixed-income fund both gaining almost 5%. 

Stock-pickers struggled the most in January, as the S&P 500 slid 5.3% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled 9%. The hedge funds at Chase Coleman's Tiger Global Management, Alex Sacerdote's Whale Rock Capital Management and Gabe Plotkin's Melvin Capital Management were among the biggest decliners. 

“So many equity managers have been long high-momentum growth stocks for so long that now they're getting hit,” Ng said. “Many had exposure to small-cap, technology and health-care stocks, which really hurt them.”

Note: Figures are according to people familiar with the results. Spokespeople for all of the firms declined to comment. 

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