Hedge funds achieved a performance of 0.31% in August 2019, despite the continuously increasing unstable economic environment. Brexit is getting more chaotic with the suspension of the UK parliament and a newly created law, which forcing the PM to delay Brexit to 2020. A general election was denied twice. The trade war between China and the US tightens further with the new tariffs on consumer goods. Furthermore, the conflict in Hongkong does not seem to end very soon either. Aside from political problems, the current economic situation with diminishing yields of fixed income and the inverted yield curve in UK and the US does certainly not help. Despite these developments in the fixed income market, our strategies have yielded an 0.80% gain in July. Alternative assets getting further boosted by pension funds, as they are looking for yields, due to the current fixed income market situation. Bitcoin was more or less stable over the last month. However, the interest in Bitcoin surely did not decline, as for example China starts its own cryptocurrency and Bitfinex issuing
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leveraged trading on Bitcoin and Ethereum with 100x. There may be several drivers for this development, such as its increased acceptance as well as its market development during the year. The Bitcoin Altcoin Actively Managed strategy achieved the best YTD performance of all strategies on our platform. Another key driver might be, that investors seek uncorrelated assets, for which cryptocurrencies are ideal investments, as shown in Figure 1.
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STONE MOUNTAIN CAPITAL RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE VOL.81
Indubitably, the cryptocurrency market has caught the attention of investors and traders, who are engaging vigorously due to its volatile nature. The crypto market has reached a market capitalisation of ca. $400 billion, half of which is in Bitcoin ($140bn) and Ethereum ($70bn). Crypto markets are affected on a large scale by regulatory and sentiment factors, which makes technical analysis desirable, hence many CTAs that apply such techniques have added cryptocurrencies in their trading portfolios. One of the theories that could reveal patterns is the Elliott Wave Principle, developed in the late 1920s and believing that the swings of market psychology appear in similar repetitive patterns, which Elliot classified as waves. The waves were essentially the consistencies of investors’ reactions to external factors. Despite the principle’s popularity, its difficulty to be applied should be stressed out as investors attempt to analyse the patterns. The divergence in opinions about the Bitcoin’s price projection highlights the predicaments in applying theories and considering the unregulated nature of crypto markets all theories may lead to a worth of zero. The main and biggest issue that technical traders face is defining the duration and length of the first wave and then to apply the rules, therefore many traders that analyse the same horizon may end up with different signals. The other hurdle is the applicability of the principle in cryptocurrencies. This perspective will consider it applicable due to the sentiment driven Bitcoin, although this may change in the future with the inclusion of more computerised trading. For the purpose of this perspective, we will examine different time horizons and the most recent crashes and rallies of the Bitcoin price. ![]()
Hedge Funds Hedge funds started 2017 under pressure and the overall industry’s model was in question. Performance and fees were the main topic of debate among investors at the beginning of the year, but hedge funds managed to pull a strong year with no down month. Despite losses from some large managers, the industry overall generated strong returns according to HFR data attracting more capital. Per HFR, total hedge fund industry AuM increased by $59bn to $3.21tr, the sixth consecutive quarterly record for total industry AuM. The inflows suggest a sign of regained optimism, but the industry will need to sustain its performance long-term in order to regain its calibre. The oxymoron of the industry is the fact that equity hedge were the best performing strategies amongst hedge funds but suffered the biggest outflows. Macro, CTAs and multi-strategy attracted more capital this year, and given the outlook for more volatility and less central bank intervention, investors target further allocations in those sub-sectors. Stone Mountain Capital Strategies 2017 was the year producing the strongest return for hedge funds since 2013 and second best since 2009. Stone Mountain Capital strategies outperformed in last year’s environment across all asset classes. Credit was the only strategy underperforming its peers, caused by yield compression in the direct lending space. One, out of only three negative strategies was in credit, while the other two, were CTAs that struggled amid the low volatility and trendless environment. Despite these two strategies, tactical trading was overall the best performing strategy with strong returns generated by discretionary global macro and cryptocurrency. Equities enjoyed a very profitable year and Stone Mountain Capital’s mandated equity hedge managers produced astonishing returns, beating their traditional and alternative peers. Finally, fund of hedge funds recovered from their 2016 losses, surviving while the industry’s model is evolving. ![]() Figure 3. Stone Mountain Capital In-House Indices vs. Major Benchmark Indices Hedge Funds and Long Only in 2017, Stone Mountain Capital Research; SMC strategy indices are not investable products but are used as indication of our managers' performance and are calculated with the equally-weighted method. ![]()
STONE MOUNTAIN CAPITAL RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE VOL.69 The most popular and controversial topic this year within finance and tech circles is the rise of Bitcoin and crypto markets. Bitcoin jumped into mainstream and financial products like futures, options, funds, certificates, ETNs, ETFs are being designed to allow exposure to cryptocurrencies. The last one and a half month, we evidenced a huge growth of the crypto market, with its capitalisation surpassing $561bn from $182bn on the first day of November. The crypto market metamorphosed into a market bigger than CTAs, a $343bn well-established alternative investment market. Crypto market, according to CoinMarketCap, consists of 1360 cryptocurrencies, but Bitcoin and Ethereum account for around 67% of this market. Bitcoin market cap became almost three times bigger within two months, being a $318bn market now, with its price rising from $6,750 in the first day of November to $18,000. Ethereum was the fourth largest coin market in 2015 behind Bitcoin, Ripple and LiteCoin, but as we approach the end of 2017, the $66bn Ethereum market cap is nearly double of Ripple and Litecoin’s capitalisation combined. |
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