According to our estimates, CTA and Global Macro strategies have so far extended their winning streak in July. While we recently talked about the reasons for the outperformance of CTAs (+9.3% year-to-date), the performance of Global Macro strategies is a bit more ambiguous, due to the elevated dispersion between strategies.

With only about 12% of the distressed debt maturing within the next two years, liquidity pressure is likely to remain benign. Meanwhile, the number of issuers seeking a maturity extension, amendments or waivers to their financial covenants remain tame.

Systematic Global Macro and CTAs are often associated because many strategies are multi-asset, global, and have a top down investment process. Benchmark indices tend to pool them together.

Today any ESG manager has to access, understand and analyse vast amounts of data, from worker safety standards to greenhouse gas emissions, to meet their commitment (and investors' expectations) to embed ESG analysis into their portfolio management.

For the second month in a row, CTAs outperformed hedge fund strategies in April. According to the Lyxor CTA peer group, the strategy was up +1.6% in April, which brings the year-to-date performance close to +5%.