Thursday, June 20, 2013

State of the Industry? CTA’s Think Positive for 2013

By Attain Capital

Since we’re approaching the halfway point of 2013, we feel it might be nice to get a feel for the atmosphere surrounding managed futures. Enter, CTA Intelligence, a new digital magazine. Their most recent post is out, breaking down a CTA survey with some interesting stats confirming CTA’s thoughts on the direction of managed futures.

Source: CTA Intelligence

For you those of you political junkies out there, this chart brings memories of President Ronald Reagan asking a crowd of supports, “Are you better off than you were four years ago.” While CTA’s are certainly not doing any better than 2009, almost 90% of the CTA’s surveyed expect to end 2013 better than 2012. So far there’s numbers to back up their confidence (at least mild confidence). The Newedge CTA index was up 2.58% YTD through May, and the Barclay CTA Index was up 0.7%. (.7% is better than nothing right?)

So what strategy will overcome to the rest to make the most returns for these CTA’s? They say medium or long term trends.

Source: CTA Intelligence

More than 43% believe they’re going to perform better with medium to long term trends, with short trends coming in a distant 2nd, and momentum and even further 3rd place. The percentages are prone to change as some mangers are contemplating changing over to short duration trading.

(If you’re following along, you’ll more than likely realize that the breakdown is probably the exact same as the percent of programs in each sector.)

Other items of note: the EU financial .01% Tax set to kick in starting in 2014. Surprisingly enough, almost 60% think the EU financial tax is a non issue.

Source: CTA Intelligence

The rest is mostly about asset raising, which we bet most people outside of the industry don’t care all that much about (usually investors want to know how you’re going to increase their assets, not how you’re going to increase yours.) But there was one little nugget in there about managers willing to reduce fees in the right scenario:

Source: CTA Intelligence

Now, in our experience, the 78% percent “always” willing to reduce fees or “sometimes” reduce fees, only do so when you will be the manager’s new largest (or among the largest) investors in their program. Or if they are newer or smaller. If expecting it from a highly ranked program with over $50 million under management – don’t hold your breath.

See the original article >>

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