Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Following its strongest first quarter in 15 years, the Nordic hedge fund industry sustained momentum into April. As reflected by the Nordic Hedge Index, Nordic hedge funds averaged a 0.8 percent gain in April, pushing their year-to-date advance to 6.2 percent. Diversified hedge funds and equity long-only funds experienced losses on average during April.

Nordic systematic trend-following CTAs, macro, and managed futures vehicles advanced by 19.1 percent on average in the first four months of 2024, following a 4.6 percent gain in April. Notably, Anna Fund, a Norwegian fund that employs a momentum strategy on Bitcoin futures, contributed 3.1 percent to this strategy category’s April gain, after surging 40.5 percent for the month. Equity hedge funds posted a more modest 1.0 percent gain in April, bringing their 2024 performance to 6.2 percent, surpassing last year’s advance of 5.8 percent.

Multi-manager hedge funds and fixed-income vehicles posted gains of 0.5 percent and 0.4 percent in April, respectively. Following an 11.4 percent increase in 2023, rebounding from a 6.9 percent decline in 2022, the fixed-income strategy sub-category has gained 4.8 percent in the first four months of this year. Conversely, diversified hedge funds, largely comprised of multi-asset, multi-strategy strategies, recorded an average decline of 0.5 percent in April. Long-only equity managers with hedge fund-like characteristics, a category outside of the Nordic Hedge Index, saw an average loss of 1.5 percent in April, reducing their year-to-date advance to 8.2 percent. 

In April, the top 20 percent of Nordic hedge funds achieved an average gain of 5.2 percent and the bottom 20 percent incurred an average loss of 2.7 percent on average, resulting in a top-to-bottom dispersion of 7.9 percent. Three in every five members of the Nordic Hedge Index recorded gains for the month of April. About 88 percent of all funds within the Nordic Hedge Index posted gains in the first four months of 2024.

Best NHX Performers in April

Anna Fund, a Norwegian fund utilizing a momentum strategy on Bitcoin futures, stands out on the performance charts with a surge of 156 percent in the first four months of 2024 and 40.5 percent in April alone. Established by three Norwegian friends in mid-2023, Anna Fund uses inverse perpetual Bitcoin futures to execute its momentum strategy that seeks to capitalize on Bitcoin’s fluctuations using price and volume data. With assets just under NOK 50 million before the turn of the year, Anna Fund oversees NOK 164 million as of the end of April.

Pensum Global Opportunities, an opportunistic long/short equity fund, followed suit with an advance of 11.2 percent in April, with exposure to gold and silver mines being its strongest contributors. The fund overseen by Peter Andersland, co-founder of the Norwegian hedge fund platform Sector Asset Management, gained 14.9 percent in the first four months of the year. 

Brobacke Global Allokering, a discretionary multi-asset global macro fund overseen by Nils Brobacke, gained 6.7 percent in April, following an advance of 5.5 percent in March, bringing the fund’s performance for the year in positive territory at 4.9 percent. Activist investor Accendo gained 5.8 percent in April, reducing the year-to-date decline to 7.5 percent.

Among this year’s top performers in the Nordic Hedge Index are the long-biased equity hedge fund TIND Discovery Fund and the systematic macro vehicle Lynx Systematic Macro, both of which enjoyed strong performance in April with gains of 5.3 percent and 5.1 percent, respectively. Lynx Asset Management’s systematic macro vehicle gained 25.5 percent over the first four months of 2024, while TIND Asset Management’s fund specializing in small- and mid-cap stocks gained 22.4 percent during this period.

Top Performing Long-Only Equity Funds

In September, HedgeNordic introduced a new sub-strategy category to the Nordic Hedge Index: Equity Long-Only (ELO). This category is home to funds that would fall short of qualifying as a hedge fund due to their long-only trading approach but exhibit habitual characteristics of a hedge fund strategy (e.g., leverage and derivatives usage, portfolio concentration, fee structure, a spin-off of a long/short strategy, and absolute return objectives, among others).