CTA’s Tough Run Continues: Currency Traders Outperform

CTAs had their toughest month thus far in 2025, according to the Barclay CTA Index, with only one sub-strategy remaining in the black after the first third of the year.

The headline CTA Index from BarclayHedge was -2.15%, its worst performance in more than five years, bringing the year-to-date performance down to -2.57%. Currency managers managed to survive the mayhem in markets in April, ending just -0.01%, for -0.2% year-to-date. This makes it, ironically, the second-best performer thus far in 2025, behind only the Discretionary Traders Index at +2.04%.

Even that best performing sub-strategy struggled in April, with the discretionary index dropping 1.25%, to eat into its return – indeed only two sub-indices, Agri and Crypto traders, were positive, the latter by 4.85%, bringing year-to-date to -15.68%, the worst performer thus far.

Although discretionary traders did struggle, they once again outperformed their systematic brethren, with the Systematic Traders Index falling 2.37% for -3.91% year-to-date. Even worse, the MPI Barclay Elite Systematic Traders Index, which is constructed to capture the returns of the 20 largest systematic traders, fell 4.43% in April, for -6.83% year-to-date. Only the crypto index is behind, something that is likely to change given the surge in crypto prices in May.

The BTOP50 Index, which seeks to replicate the overall composition of the managed futures industry with regard to trading style and overall market exposure, also struggled in April at an estimated -3.31%, its worst performance since March 2023. This plunges the index to -3.08% year-to-date.

The discretionary outperformance was confirmed by SG Markets, whose Macro Trading Index (Discretionary), while dropping 0.4% in April, easily beat the Macro Trading Index (Quantitative) at -0.84%. Year-to-date the latter is -0.88%, while the former is +3.16%. The overall SG Macro Trading Index was -0.57% in April, for +1.66% year-to-date.