As 2011 draws to a close and everyone begins to reflect over the happenings of the past year, those with money ‘at work’ usually become particularly pensive. Could I have done better? Could I have done worse? Does my portfolio need adjusting? The self-examination process this year is perhaps even more strenuous than usual. With managed futures set to round out the year with losses overall, those invested in CTAs may have more questions than usual as they look at what worked (if anything), and what didn’t amongst the managed futures programs they follow.

These are loaded questions- especially in the chaos that has been 2011- so we took some extra time to make sure the perspective here was what we needed. Plus, there will be no newsletter the next two weeks with our offices closed Mon. the 26th and Mon. the 2nd. We typically end the year by breaking down how individual programs had performed throughout the year, but usually end up repeating ourselves quite a bit through that process (i.e. this program, like the rest of the trend followers, did xyz because of the same market environment). To avoid this repetition, we instead looked this year to break down managed futures performance by strategy type.

The difficulty in this kind of analysis is establishing what categories are most appropriate to use. There are a wide variety of factors that can differentiate one program from another. That being said, in our analysis of a wide universe of managed futures programs, we found a series of elements that created unique enough distinctions to warrant specific categories.

To learn about the categories we decided upon, and how managed futures programs within those categories performed during 2011, click here.