- Alternative Assets
- Global Macroeconomics
- Markets
- Miscellaneous
- Portfolio Management
- Quarterly Global Valuations
- Wealth Management
Trend-Following
Firm
Type
Asset Allocation
July 2026
The Perfect Hedge
One River Asset Management
Research
14 Pages
One River Asset Management presents a framework for integrating risk mitigation into a Total Portfolio Approach to improve long-term compounding rather than evaluating hedges in isolation.
Alternative Assets
July 2026
Rethinking Diversification: Bonds, Commodities and Trend in the Current Market Regime
Aspect Capital
Research
10 Pages
Aspect Capital examines whether the investing environment that supported the classic 60/40 portfolio is giving way to a new regime shaped by inflation, deglobalization, and geopolitical instability.
Alternative Assets
July 2026
An Expanding Market Universe
Graham Capital Management
Research
4 Pages
Graham Capital Management examines whether expanding the number of markets traded can improve systematic trend-following performance.
Alternative Assets
June 2026
A Trend Following Deep Dive: Cash (Equities) Is King
Man Group
Research
18 Pages
Man Group examines how cash equities can broaden trend-following beyond equity index futures.
Alternative Assets
June 2026
Quarterly Insights: Chasing Trends or Chasing Performance?
Quantica Capital
Research
13 Pages
Quantica Capital examines whether investors can improve trend following results by dynamically allocating capital across asset classes based on recent performance.
Alternative Assets
May 2026
You Can Trade (Almost) Like Mulvaney
Research
18 Pages
Concretum Research reverse engineers Paul Mulvaney’s long term CTA strategy using 4,320 synthetic trend following programs.
Alternative Assets
May 2026
A Trend Following Deep Dive: The Optimal Market Mix for a Trend Follower
Man Group
Research
6 Pages
Man Group examines how trend followers should allocate across markets, showing that there is no single optimal mix.
Alternative Assets
March 2026
Assessing Alpha in Macro Strategies
AlphaSimplex
Research
11 Pages
AlphaSimplex examines whether macro managers add value beyond plain equity and trend exposure.
Alternative Assets
March 2026
The Best Defensive Strategies: Two Centuries of Evidence
Alpha Architect
Research
9 Pages
The author examines downside protection—or defensive—strategies over more than 220 years of global financial history, covering many years in which traditional equity–bond portfolios suffer and across a wide range of economic scenarios and historical regimes. They find trend-following provides the most effective downside protection.
Alternative Assets
February 2026
Themes of 2025: System Design Makes A Difference During Turbulence
AlphaSimplex
Research
10 Pages
Kathryn Kaminski analyzes how trend following strategies performed in 2025.
Portfolio Management
December 2025
Hold the Dip
AQR
Research
22 Pages
AQR examines whether the popular buy the dip mantra actually beats a simple buy and hold approach over many decades.
Alternative Assets
December 2025
Stop the Losses!
Research Affiliates
Research
15 Pages
Research Affiliates examines how systematic strategies can suffer large drawdowns and shows how stop loss rules can improve risk profiles while preserving process discipline.
Alternative Assets
November 2025
Eastern Frontier: Unlocking Diversification in China
Man Group
Research
13 Pages
Man Group says improving access to more of China's uncorrelated markets offers diversification opportunities to global investors as market dispersion increases.
Alternative Assets
September 2025
A Trend Following Deep Dive: The Dynamics of Dispersion
Man Group
Research
13 Pages
Man AHL investigates why performance dispersion among trend-following CTAs remains wide despite similar strategies.
Alternative Assets
August 2025
High-Vol Trend Following – The Most Valuable Alternative Investment?
DUNN Capital Management
Research
13 Pages
DUNN Capital argues that true “alternative” strategies should diversify by timing—delivering negative correlation, positive skew, and convexity when equities sell off.
Alternative Assets
July 2025
Living with Trend Following: Lessons From the Past 25 Years
Aspect Capital
Research
14 Pages
Aspect Capital examines how systematic trend-following strategies have navigated four major macroeconomic periods—from the DotCom bubble to the post-pandemic inflation surge.
Alternative Assets
June 2025
Trend Following and Drawdowns: Is This Time Different?
Man Group
Research
43 Pages
While trend following has had a tough start to 2025, Man Group explains why historically, those who have stayed the course have benefitted.
Alternative Assets
June 2025
Truth or Trend: Separating Signal from Noise
Man Group
Research
17 Pages
Man Group explores how trend-following strategies—diversified across many asset classes—capture unpredictable market moves and provide “crisis alpha” through disciplined, multi-market positioning.
Alternative Assets
June 2025
Market Cycles and Managed Futures Drawdowns
AlphaSimplex
Research
8 Pages
Kathryn Kaminski analyzes prior Managed Futures drawdown and recovery periods and shares common themes.
Alternative Assets
May 2025
Walking the Tightrope: Trend Following’s Tricky Tradeoffs
Research Affiliates
Research
20 Pages
Research Affiliates demonstrates how trend-following can be a tightrope act: dialing up the strategy’s prized positive skew for crash-era payoffs invariably chips away at its Sharpe ratio, so allocators must decide how much smooth return they are willing to sacrifice for tail-risk insurance.
Trend-Following
May 2025
The Patience Premium
Virtus Funds
Research
4 Pages
While managed futures strategies are in the midst of a historically challenging period of performance, the strategy historically performed well in the time periods following drawdowns.
Alternative Assets
April 2025
Trade War Crisis or Correction: Managed Futures and Crisis Alpha in 2025
AlphaSimplex
Research
7 Pages
Kathryn Kaminski analyzes past drawdowns in the S&P 500 and highlights that trend following tends to struggle at the onset of new trends and it tends to thrive in their extension.
Alternative Assets
April 2025
Why Patience Matters During Market Stress
Man Group
Research
6 Pages
Man Group examines the performance of trend-following strategies during periods of market stress, emphasizing the importance of patience.
Trend-Following
April 2025
Trend Following Through Turmoil: Why the Best Protection Comes After the First Punch
Newfound Research
Research
6 Pages
Corey Hoffstein explores how trend following strategies behave during equity market drawdowns.
Alternative Assets
January 2025
Does Trend Following Still Work on Stocks
Longboard Asset Management
Research
19 Pages
The paper revisits the efficacy of trend-following strategies on U.S. stocks, extending their analysis from 1950 through November 2024.
Trend-Following
November 2024
Trend-Following and Long-Short Quality: Loading the Dice
Man Group
Research
7 Pages
Man Group examines the limitations of relying solely on trend-following strategies during sudden market volatility and proposes integrating long-short quality strategies to enhance portfolio resilience against sudden market volatility.
Alternative Assets
October 2024
The Additional Benefits of Trend-Following when Interest Rates are High
Quantica Capital
Research
13 Pages
Quantica Capital examines how elevated cash rates change the role of trend-following strategies in traditional portfolios.
Trend-Following
October 2024
Just Buy The Index
Transtrend
Research
8 pages Pages
Transtrend examines the complexities of replicating Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) index returns through exchange-traded funds (ETFs), highlighting the challenges and potential pitfalls of such strategies.
Portfolio Management
July 2024
The Yieldy Put: To Infinity and Beyond Bonds
Man Group
Research
8 Pages
Man suggests that liquid alternative strategies, specifically trend-following and long/short quality stocks, could be viewed as the new bonds, providing both diversification and defensiveness.
Alternative Assets
June 2024
A Century of Profitable Industry Trends
Optimal Momentum
Research
34 Pages
This evaluates the profitability of an industry-based long-only trend-following portfolio, utilizing 48 industry portfolios from 1926 to 2024.
Trend-Following
June 2024
The History of Managed Futures
RCM Alternatives
Research
16 Pages
RCM Alternatives delves into the evolution of managed futures, tracing their origins from the 1800s to their current prominence among major investment strategies.
Alternative Assets
May 2024
The Managed Futures Ecosystem: The Rise of the Managed Futures ETF
AlphaSimplex
Research
12 Pages
Kathryn Kaminski walks through the history of publicly traded managed futures funds to date, the important characteristics to think about when allocating to the space, and the recent growth of publicly available products via ETFs.
Alternative Assets
April 2024
Honey, I Shrunk the Trend-Following
Man Group
Research
8 Pages
This paper tries to answer the question, ‘how much trend following should I hold in my portfolio?’ while considering the real-world constraints of investor preferences, lookback window and tracking error.
Portfolio Management
February 2024
Risk Parity with Trend Following
LongTail Alpha
Research
17 Pages
This paper evaluates how augmenting traditional risk-parity portfolios with trend-following strategies—especially those incorporating carry filters—can improve risk-adjusted performance.
Alternative Assets
February 2024
Capturing Unpredictability
Aspect Capital
Research
11 Pages
Aspect Capital highlights the attributes of trend following (adaptability, agility and resilience) and suggests it may be better to think of trend following as “unpredictability alpha” instead of “crisis alpha.”
Alternative Assets
November 2023
Blinded By Bias
Efficient Capital Management
Research
6 Pages
Efficient Capital examines how hindsight and survivorship biases distort manager selection in managed futures, leading investors to chase past winners and underestimate failure risks.
Alternative Assets
January 2023
Cross-sectional Momentum in Cryptocurrency Markets
Starkiller Capital
Research
14 Pages
Starkiller Capital explores whether short term cross-sectional momentum exists in crypto and how to trade it sensibly.
Alternative Assets
December 2022
Should Your Portfolio Protection Work Fast or Slow?
AQR
Research
16 Pages
AQR Capital Management compares protection that pays off quickly in crashes versus defenses built for long, grinding drawdowns.
Alternative Assets
December 2022
Trend-Following: Why Now? A Macro Perspective
AQR
Research
17 Pages
AQR Capital Management explains why trend following may be well suited for a world where macro volatility is back.
Alternative Assets
September 2022
The Raisons d’être of Managed Futures
AQR
Research
14 Pages
AQR explains why managed futures is intended to deliver two things: positive average returns and meaningful help in equity drawdowns.
Alternative Assets
June 2021
Trend-Following In Inflationary Environments
Man Group
Research
9 Pages
Man Group examines how different asset classes and strategies perform during inflationary regimes, using nearly a century of data across major markets.
Alternative Assets
May 2021
Semi-Annual Managed Futures Rankings
RCM Alternatives
Research
16 Pages
This paper explores managed futures rankings and performance dispersion, focusing on how strategies and managers compare across cycles.
Alternative Assets
January 2021
Managed Futures 2020 – Strategy Review
RCM Alternatives
Research
11 Pages
RCM argues that managed futures can play a critical role in portfolios by providing crisis alpha and diversification, especially when traditional assets struggle.
Alternative Assets
December 2020
A half-century of trend-following: How CTAs make money in different yield curve regimes
Quantica Capital
Research
11 Pages
Quantica Capital examines how diversified trend following CTAs have made money across different yield curve regimes over nearly fifty years.
Alternative Assets
September 2020
The Market Environment For Trendfollowing
Abbey Capital
Research
29 Pages
Abbey Capital examines why trend following struggled in the past decade and what could drive a turnaround.
Alternative Assets
July 2020
Tail Risk Hedging: Contrasting Put And Trend Strategies
AQR
Research
16 Pages
AQR examines how investors should hedge extreme market downturns by comparing option-based protection with trend-following strategies.
Alternative Assets
December 2019
Fundamental Trends and Dislocated Markets
AQR
Research
28 Pages
AQR explores how combining systematic trend-following with opportunistic macro strategies can improve global macro investing outcomes.
Alternative Assets
December 2019
You Can’t Always Trend When You Want
AQR
Research
14 Pages
AQR examines why trend-following strategies have struggled in the past decade, arguing the issue is not structural but driven by unusually small market moves across asset classes.
Alternative Assets
October 2019
Macro Timing with Trend Following
Newfound Research
Research
12 Pages
Newfound Research explores whether macro and momentum signals can improve factor rotation, testing adaptive multi-factor allocation strategies against a simple equal-weight approach.
Alternative Assets
April 2019
You Can’t Always Trend When You Want
AQR
Research
19 Pages
AQR examines why trend-following strategies have struggled in the past decade, arguing the issue is not structural but tied to smaller market moves overall.
Alternative Assets
October 2017
A Century of Evidence on Trend Following Investing
AQR
Research
26 Pages
AQR Capital Management examines whether trend following has delivered persistent returns across changing market environments since 1880.
Alternative Assets
September 2017
Can You Time Managed Futures?
Steben & Company
Research
2 Pages
Steben & Company examines whether investors can successfully time managed futures allocations by studying decades of Sharpe ratio cycles and performance reversals.
Alternative Assets
May 2017
Selecting the Optimal Investment Universe in Managed Futures
PIMCO
Research
8 Pages
PIMCO examines how trend following strategies behave across different market environments, arguing they may provide diversification when traditional assets struggle.
Alternative Assets
June 2016
Why You Need Trend Systems in Your Portfolio
Societe Generale
Research
34 Pages
Societe Generale explores how multi asset trend following strategies can strengthen portfolios during expensive equity and bond markets.
Alternative Assets
December 2015
Dissecting Investment Strategies in the Cross Section and Time Series
Man Group
Research
31 Pages
This paper examines how cross sectional and time series investment strategies differ across equities, bonds, commodities, and currencies.
Alternative Assets
April 2015
Carry and Trend in Lots of Places
PIMCO
Research
12 Pages
PIMCO examines whether carry and trend signals can improve investing outcomes across global markets.
Alternative Assets
February 2015
Return Dispersion, Counterintuitive Correlation: The Role of Diversification in CTA Portfolios
Campbell & Company
Research
12 Pages
Campbell & Company examines why CTA managers can post dramatically different results despite appearing highly correlated.
Alternative Assets
September 2014
Trend-Following Through the Rates Cycle
PIMCO
Research
8 Pages
PIMCO examines whether trend following can still work in rising rate environments, challenging the view that falling yields solely drove managed futures returns Using data from 1962 to 2013
Alternative Assets
October 2013
A Comparison of Indices
Red Rock Capital
Research
2 Pages
Red Rock Capital compares the leading CTA indices, explaining how construction methods, weighting approaches, and inclusion criteria shape performance results.
Alternative Assets
September 2013
Short-Term Reversal in Equity Index Futures
Quantpedia
Research
2 Pages
This paper examines whether a simple contrarian strategy can generate excess returns by trading equity index futures based on short term reversals.
Alternative Assets
July 2013
Managed Futures: Stepping Up the Quest for Portfolio Diversifi cation
FWD
Research
12 Pages
Forward explains how managed futures have evolved into a diversified investment strategy with historically low correlations to traditional assets.
Alternative Assets
June 2013
Assessing Stop-loss and Re-entry Strategies
Wellershoff & Partners Ltd
Research
36 Pages
Wellershoff & Partners evaluates whether combining stop loss rules with disciplined re entry strategies can improve investment outcomes across global asset classes.
Alternative Assets
June 2013
Sortino: A ‘Sharper’ Ratio
Red Rock
Research
6 Pages
Red Rock Capital explains why the Sortino ratio offers a more useful way to evaluate risk adjusted performance than the Sharpe ratio by focusing only on downside volatility.
Alternative Assets
February 2013
Demystifying Managed Futures
Research
29 Pages
The authors explain how managed futures largely derive their returns from simple time series momentum strategies rather than mysterious trading techniques.
Alternative Assets
January 2013
The Case for Managed Futures
Longboard Asset Management
Research
11 Pages
Longboard Asset Management explains how adding managed futures to a traditional stock and bond portfolio can improve diversification and reduce downside risk.
Alternative Assets
October 2012
Managed Futures as Portfolio Diversifier
CXO Advisory
Research
2 Pages
This paper revisits whether managed futures improve portfolio diversification versus hedge funds and traditional stock and bond allocations.
Alternative Assets
September 2012
A Century of Evidence on Trend-Following Investing
AQR
Research
12 Pages
AQR Capital Management examines more than a century of market data to test whether trend following has been a persistent source of returns or simply a recent phenomenon.