With the turmoil stemming from events in the Middle East, February already feels like a distant memory. Yet looking back briefly, Nordic hedge funds continued their strong start to the year, advancing an additional 0.8 percent in February. Trend-following CTAs led performance for a second consecutive month, while returns were broadly positive across all strategy groups.
All five sub-strategies in the Nordic Hedge Index ended February in positive territory, although equity long/short funds once again exhibited significant dispersion between the weakest and strongest performers. Systematic trend-following CTAs, macro, and managed futures strategies led the pack for a second consecutive month, bringing their gains for the first two months of the year to 4.4 percent.
By contrast, equity long/short funds experienced a more muted month amid substantial dispersion, with returns ranging from a decline of 11 percent to a gain of 13 percent. Long-only equity managers, tracked separately from the index, advanced 1.1 percent in February, bringing their year-to-date performance in 2026 into positive territory.
The small cohort of multi-manager funds also delivered another solid month, rising 1.3 percent on average in February and taking their gains for the first two months of 2026 to 3.2 percent. Diversified strategies, spanning multi-asset, multi-strategy, and niche approaches, advanced 0.7 percent in February and are up 2.1 percent year-to-date through the end of the month. Fixed income hedge fund managers continued their strong run as well, gaining 0.7 percent in February.
Dispersion remained a defining feature in February, although it narrowed slightly compared to the previous month. The top 20 percent of funds advanced an average of 4.5 percent, while the bottom 20 percent declined by 3.3 percent, resulting in a top-to-bottom dispersion of 7.8 percent. In January, by comparison, the top 20 percent gained 5.1 percent on average while the bottom cohort lost 3.0 percent. Overall, nearly three-quarters of funds reporting performance figures generated positive returns in February.
Best Performing Nordic Hedge Funds in February
Colosseum Global Alpha, which had a difficult January, staged a strong rebound and topped the performance chart for the month with a return of 13.3 percent. For the long/short equity fund managed by Oleg Sutjagin and Eric Andersson, several of January’s lagging positions rebounded sharply, helping recover a significant portion of the earlier losses. Estlander & Partners Freedom, which combines systematic macro with price-driven trend-following models, followed with a gain of 7.4 percent in February.
Coeli Energy Opportunities, a long-biased long/short equity fund focused on the energy transition, has also enjoyed a solid start to the year, gaining 10.6 percent over the first two months of 2026 after advancing 6.1 percent in February. Two Norwegian equity hedge funds, Sector Zen Fund and Taiga Fund, rounded out the top five performers, each posting gains of roughly 5.7 percent.
Top Performing Long-Only Equity Funds
In September of 2023, 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).
