Enduring The Languishment

Jeff Malec from RCM Capital Tweeted the following series of charts to help frame what has been going on with managed futures. 

Here's a sampling of what some of the funds have been doing over the same period.

The names don't matter, the group has been grinding around. It may not feel like it but in the same period, the S&P 500 is up almost 5% even though it was pretty flat in October. A few months of grinding around is nothing new if you've been involved with the space for awhile. But what about that five year stretch where moreso than grinding around they were grinding down? For five years. 

If you read posts here regularly, for as much as we talk about managed futures, it seems reasonable to think you might have some interest in managed futures too. Where managed futures are not the thing that goes up the most, most of the time, I think it is helpful to chronicle the periods where managed futures struggles. There was (still is?) all that content about putting a ton into managed futures, the current period is the dark side, the downside of doing that. 

Normalizing the periodic struggles of managed futures makes the struggles easier to endure. Oh yeah, managed futures can struggle for months or years at a time. Any strategy or tools you employ will have tradeoffs and one of them for managed futures is they can languish for quite a while. 

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