At first glance, this month’s performance appears to be a bit of a head scratcher, with three of the four indices we watch reporting negative performance for the month of July (thus far), despite a major down trend in grains, providing the best returns in years for many agriculture trading CTAs we track.

The reason is the indices are comprised mainly of the largest managers, who are generally trend followers and generally not very exposed to the grain markets. It just goes to show the diverse amount of strategies that represent the Managed Futures Industry, which in July was quite wondrous, or terribly frustrating, depending on whether the strategy type you were invested in caught the down move in grains.  Here’s the month by month performance of Managed Futures for 2014 thus far:

(Disclaimer: past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results)
(Only 23% of returns reported to the BarclayHedge CTA Index)