By Neil O'Hara
Global macro funds make investments all over the place, so it's not surprising that their investment results are usually all over the place as well. But last year's dispersion of returns among global macro managers seems unusually wide. Those who concluded that the world wasn't coming to an end caught the meteoric rise in markets from the March 2009 lows and had strong years. The pessimists, who have been worried about inflation and were busy buying gold and shorting sovereign credits, have had a harder year. Figuring out what 2010 will bring may be tougher for both factions.
As a group, global macro managers slogged through 2009. The AR Macro Index was up just 6.67% last year, less than half the 14.79% return on the AR Composite Index, a proxy for the entire hedge fund industry. But the aggregate figures for global macro conceal a particularly wide...