Behind the scenes, we have reconstituted our indices, adding new members to all of them. Both the ones that are on the website, and the indices that are only available via the download options (e.g. a further breakdown of Commodity Specialists). Each index has fully disclosed members that can be viewed on our website.

While we observe an increasing number of managers in most of the indices, we also note a decline in the managers that are part of the diversified CTA index. We believe we track a significant part of the managers, but that were delays in reporting final numbers. Our current count of CTAs reporting is back to 600+ in the main database. However, the method to construct the indices remains strict, we only include managers where we have December data at the end of January.

A trend that seems to be more substantial, is the decline of commodity specialists. These have to a larger degree been insourced by various multi-managers/pod shops. In particular, Systematic Commodity managers had a difficult year as several ‘Alternative’ market managers got whipsawed in the less liquid markets.

Indices can be downloaded for free here (you need to be registered): https://nilssonhedge.com/my-account/free-data/

The collection of returns and managers continues to grow. Currently, we have 587k monthly return observations sourced from over 15k unique sources.