- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -

Trend-Following Alfa Axiom Fund Stages a Comeback in July

- Advertisement -

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Trend-following fund Alfa Axiom Fund generated a whopping return of 8.30% in July, reducing the fund’s year-to-date loss to 5.15%. This represents the fund’s most profitable month since achieving a return of 8.38% in January 2015. The July return came as a breath of fresh air for Alfa Axiom Fund, as the fund was down a worrying 12.42% in the first half of 2017.

The lackluster performance experienced by many trend-following CTAs in the last couple of months was mostly attributable to a lack of volatility. Specifically, a lack of directional volatility hurt performance within the universe of CTA funds. However, Nordic CTA funds, as measured by the NHX CTA Index, staged a comeback in July, returning 2.37% in the first month of the second half of 2017. The CTA family of funds was by far the best performing sub-category within the NHX universe in July.

Alfa Axiom Fund’s largest drivers of performance at the beginning of July were the fund’s long positions in the grain markets, as well as short positions in European and American bonds. During the last several days of the month, the fund managed to add another 1.5 percentage points to the final performance figure despite experiencing headwinds for a couple of days. Alfa Axiom Fund ended up taking profits across the board, leaving only a few small positions: long positions in the British pound and the Euro, as well as gasoline and heating oil.

After enjoying the 8.30% return in July, fund manager Thomas Stridsman believes achieving a good profit for the year is “certainly within reach.” Nonetheless, Alfa Axiom Fund needs a far-fetched 18 percentage-point gain to reach a new equity high, after the fund suffered losses both in 2015 and 2016.

Subscribe to HedgeBrev, HedgeNordic’s weekly newsletter, and never miss the latest news!

Our newsletter is sent once a week, every Friday.

Eugeniu Guzun
Eugeniu Guzun
Eugeniu Guzun serves as a data analyst responsible for maintaining and gatekeeping the Nordic Hedge Index, and as a journalist covering the Nordic hedge fund industry for HedgeNordic. Eugeniu completed his Master’s degree at the Stockholm School of Economics in 2018. Write to Eugeniu Guzun at eugene@hedgenordic.com

Latest Articles

Fishing Where the Fish Are

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – With a wealth of experience in value creation gained from his tenure at McKinsey and later in private equity at SEB,...

Norwegian Trio Aims to Capture Bitcoin Momentum

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Three Norwegian friends, who have known each other since their school days and pursued their master’s studies at the same university,...

Formue Leads Charge for Cash Hurdles

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – In the decade following the financial crisis, the low-interest-rate environment enabled many hedge funds to launch without setting cash-based hurdle rates...

AP3 Re-Enters Emerging Markets with a Fresh Lens

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Sweden’s buffer fund, AP3 Tredje AP-fonden, made the decision to divest all of its equity exposure to emerging markets in 2022...

Beyond the Frontier of Emerging Markets

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Frontier markets, often characterized by their smaller size, low-income economies, growing populations and underdeveloped infrastructure compared to emerging or developed markets, are...

New Era for Arden xFund

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Just over after successfully running his time-tested systematic trend-following approach with Epoque, Martin Redgård has assumed management of another fund, Arden...

Allocator Interviews

Latest Articles

In-Depth: Emerging Markets

Voices

Request for Proposal

- Advertisement -