CTAs Up in July, Still Struggling in 2025

Early data from BarclayHedge indicates that CTAs were in the black in July, but only just, and continue to struggle to recover from losses earlier in the year in spite of two consecutive positive months.

The headline Barclay CTA Index was +0.17% with 89% of funds reporting performance, just the third month this year that it has been positive, something that is reflected in the year-to-date performance of -2.74%. Much of this negative performance was delivered amidst April’s volatility, when the index was down 2.15%.

Currency traders had another solid month, registering the best monthly return in the TradFi space at +1.88%, bringing the Barclay Currency Traders Index back to the black at +0.56%. Best performance for the month came unsurprisingly from the Cryptocurrency Traders Index, which benefited from the surge in crypto prices to return +10.56% on the month. Year-to-date, however, the index is lagging core crypto asset price rises at just +3.05%.

As was the case with hedge fund data from HFR earlier this month, for the first time in a while, systematic traders outperformed their discretionary brethren, however year-to-date the upper hand remains very much with the latter.

The Barclay Systematic Traders Index was +0.24% in July (for -4.78% year-to-date), while the Discretionary Traders index was -0.53% (+2.99%). The MPI Barclay Elite Systematic Traders Index, which is constructed to capture the returns of the 20 largest systematic traders, was +0.06% in July, for -7.55% year-to-to-date.