For the second month in a row, managed futures has struggled to find the right kind of trading environment. The Newedge CTA Index is reporting managed futures down -0.89% for September, bringing the index down to just 0.07% for the year.

While September wasn’t quite as bad as August in terms of choppy, sideways, markets, it offered few sustained trends for CTAs to latch on to, and saw some reversals of a few of the trends managers had been enjoying.

Trend followers gave back some profits in the grains with November soybeans down almost 9% and December corn down just over 5%.  Currency markets remain very difficult to trade with another round of quantitative easing launched by the Fed in mid-September, along with more fiscal alarm bells from Europe (this time in Spain) which caused the dollar to strengthen against the Euro and Aussie dollar.  Long gold, long fixed income, and long stocks continue to be staples in most trend following portfolios.