| Alternative Markets Review 2018 2018 started as strongly as it finished in 2017, but spikes in volatility caught hedge funds unprepared and highlighted the weaknesses of the industry. The rest of the year continued in the same pattern with major political risks adding to the problem such as Brexit outcome, European elections, end of quantitative easing and trade war. The fourth quarter and equities sell-off since October ruined hedge funds hopes to rebound and sank them deeper into their losses. Event-driven and equity hedge strategies were the worst performers among hedge funds, followed by systematic CTA and macro strategies. For our in-house strategies, the scenery was slightly altered as the worst performing asset class was tactical trading. Underperformance of cryptocurrency and CTAs are the main drivers of the underperformance compared to other indices, despite the strong performance of our global macro and market neutral strategies. Equities globally suffered severe losses, similar to the majority of our in-house strategies. Our niche equity strategies focusing on disruptive techno- |  logies and directors' dealing though posted strong returns and constitute our best two performing strategies for 2018, consequently leading to a relative outperformance of peer indices. Direct lending and structured credit enjoyed a good year assisting in our credit index's outperformance. Only two out of eight strategies posted losses for a year, when equity and credit largely disappointed their investors. Overall, our cross-asset and single manager index posted losses for the year due to our tactical trading underperformance, but still performed better than the majority of the individual indices. |
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