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It was a tough year for money managers. All asset classes underperformed cash and most were negative for the year. Equities were a return disaster for December. Hedge funds did not do well for the year. So what will investors do?

Risk parity was thought of as a portfolio strategy that would protect investors buffeted with uncertainty. Don’t think about dollar allocations, but risk allocations; it is a better way to manage a portfolio. Unfortunately, theory does not always work in practice. Using a simple benchmark of the average return for mutual funds with 50-70% equity allocation would have had slightly better returns than the 10% risk parity index and would have done much better than the higher vol indices in 2018.

One of our major themes for 2019 is that investors should more closely track monetary policy developments in China. The reasons are simple: the economy is big, its trade impact is global, and the PBOC at times has followed a monetary policy at odds with the Fed and ECB.

The only hedge fund sectors that made significant returns in December were global macro and systematic CTAs. These are the divergence strategies that are supposed to generate returns when there are market dislocations. Macro and systematic managers, through casting a wide net across asset classes and going both long and short, should find opportunities when there are significant dislocations. The remaining hedge fund strategies lost money, but significantly less than the exposure to market beta. It was not a successful month for most hedge funds, but it was not as bad as exposure to equity beta. However, long duration Treasuries proved to be a better hedge.

Every Fed Chairman has their own variation on the market put strategy; Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen and now Powell.  We can call this new one the “everything on the table” put strategy where the guidance of yesterday tells us nothing of what might happen tomorrow. This may be a reluctant put. Powell may have tried to stay the course for tightening, but a bear market can change the mind of many a well-intentioned central banker.

With strong trends in both bonds and equities, managed futures generated good positive returns for December. The index average does not do justice to the positive performance for some managers. For example, the CS Managed Futures Liquid Index was up around 6% for the month or four times greater than the SocGen CTA index. All of the CTA indices from BarclayHedge reported gains except for Agricultural traders. Managed futures also did well versus other hedge fund strategies and proved to be uncorrelated during the December market disruption. Versus other hedge fund strategies within the Credit Suisse liquid beta universe, managed futures outperformed other strategies by 600 to 900 bps.

December was a great trend environment for those focused on intermediate to long-term timeframes. There were profitable opportunities in both equity indices and global bonds. Equity index trends flipped early in December and have accelerated albeit with greater intraday volatility. Bond trends continue on slower macroeconomic growth numbers and the perception of a more dovish Fed. Strong signals exist for short, intermediate and long-term timeframes.

The levee broke in December with heavy selling of equities. Long duration Treasury bonds offered protection through its negative correlation with stock but there was little to make investors happy for the year. In some cases, the entire year’s return was swiped out in one month. Some analysts have suggested that this is the first time where almost all asset sectors and categories generated negative returns.