Insights

Global markets were living a nightmare in March. Coronavirus forced several countries to go into lockdown, igniting fears of a deep recession as consumers are told to stay home. Stock markets crashed and risk aversion was the only game in town, helping the defensive currencies to outperform.

The Swiss franc led the way higher, followed by the US dollar and the Japanese yen, as investors sought shelter from the storm. Across the risk spectrum, the commodity-linked Australian dollar fell off a cliff alongside the Canadian dollar, with the latter suffering as oil prices were decimated. The euro and the pound struggled too. Strikingly though, gold didn’t shine very bright. With leveraged funds absorbing heavy losses in stocks, many players were likely forced to close profitable gold positions to cover margin calls.

The overall situation has impacted our Fund in opposing ways. On one hand, increased market volatility sets the right environment for the strategies to perform and on the other hand a significant increase in the trading costs puts a bigger hurdle on producing profit. For March, the former outshined the latter and the Fund produced a significant positive return following on the high returns of January and February. We are pleased to inform you that the IXI Fund won a Barclayhedge award. This is for second best performance in February 2020 in the Currency manager category of all eligible funds.