With June now in the books, we see that so-called managed futures mutual funds are now underperforming the average of the benchmark indices for the year by an average of -8.16% after the effect of load fees (and -3.83% before the load fees).
Earlier this year we expanded our look at managed futures mutual funds to consider all of the new entrants into the space. We have been critical of these products for a few reasons. For one, they are being marketed as managed futures products, but many do not contain any actual managed futures exposure; rather they merely utilize a trend following model to approximate such exposure. Then there are some that actually do invest in underlying managed futures managers (kudos to you), but do so at a very high cost with extra layers of fees and, more often than not, a high front end sales (load) fee. And then there are those which are not providing managed futures exposure and charging load fees: the worst of the worst.
We don’t think mutual funds are the best vehicle to access the asset class if you have the capital to stand on your own and invest in individually managed accounts; and the numbers continue to back us up. After a less-than-stellar month for managed futures across the board, every mutual fund we track is underperforming the major managed futures indices after considering their front end sales fees. Read ‘em and weep below (Disclaimer: past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results).
Sorted by YTD Return After Load