Managed Futures as the future of the investment of funds

The investment motto says, „Saving is good but investment is more efficient!“ This statement moves the well-tried but low interest paid account book into the background and increases the interest of young investors constantly. But the interest in the capital market and its attractive investment possibilities does not only grow at the colleges or universities.
Traditional investments such as shares, bonds issues or immovable property do not constitute the total portfolio anymore for a long time. In particular, yield-strong investment funds are placed in the focus of the public.

However, the strong attack on the alternatives investments has a disadvantage too. The kinds of the investment possibilities are numerous and the private investors and financial managers are missing information and experience with the individual products.

Ignorance and uncertainty of the investors affect the decision for the investment strategies. The Superfund sets exactly here and informs as an offeror of Managed Futures products about the function and strategy of the investment class, which belongs to the alternative investments.

Lasting and effective success needs security instead of risk. Professional investment managers use Managed Futures since over 30 years to optimize pension funds as well as bond issues and share portfolios. According to the Barclay Group, the accruals of funds in Managed Futures rose to 17,6 per cent between June 2005 and June 2006 in Germany. As investment class they make up the total of the market of 149.5 billion US dollar.

But what hides behind Managed Futures? Managed Futures are the listed future transaction of certain trade goods and also financial products. Here offerers and customers meet each other, who have two-way expectations of the future price development of a special ware or a product. The offerer wants to hedge against sinking prices and makes agreements with his customers in advance to send his product for in advance agreed price in time.

However, the customers fear price rising; therefore they hedge the price in advance, which they are able to pay. There are also investors, who speculate in rising or falling prices and accordingly buy and/or sell Futures. Only these investors make possible to accomplish the forward pricing faster. They increase thus the liquidity of futures and options markets.

Private investors stand before the decision how they invest in the individual markets. Managed Futures funds are a type of „Universe-Weather-Investment“ because people can benefit from the rising and falling price trends in all acted markets. Until now most private investors invested in pension funds, immovable property fund or share funds.

That’s why Managed Futures of products are suitable precisely for these investors because they can increase the interest yield and also reduce the risk for the classical portfolio of pension and share funds.

The advantages of Managed Futures are convinced because they offer an extremely attractive investment-risk-profile. They are suitable optimally for the admixture for almost any depot because Managed Futures reduce the volatility. Moreover, we can say briefly that Managed Futures offer the chance of above-average profits in each market situation for a long time.

The Superfund (in former times Quadriga) was established by Christian Baha in 1995. Since the establishment the Superfund group proved to be one of the world-wide most successful offerer of Managed Futures products. Today the Superfund manages the fund total of more than 1.35 billion Euros. 370 workers care for more than 50,000 institutional and private investors in 16 countries.

The success of the company is based on the self-developed fully automatic computer commercial systems, which follow the world-wide price trends of more than 100 Futures markets. The Superfund group also co-operates world-wide with the financial control authorities to offer the customers products with highest security.

The Managed Futures strategy is one of the most well-known style directions. The Commodity Trading Advisors (CTA) invest into loans, shares, currencies or raw materials at the world-wide forward markets. The fundamental idea is the acceptance that course movements run off in so-called trends which process can be predicted by means of technical analyse tools (but with a certain probability).

In principle, investors differentiate between systematic and discrete strategies. While systematic strategies represent exclusive computer-based trend subsequent models, the investment decisions are finally made by discrete strategies on fundamental information’s basis. The respective purchase and sales decisions are exclusively made by a computer model.

CTA investments prove typically no or even a negative correlation of stock markets and are therefore an indispensable admixture of each Hedge fund portfolio.


Nicole Berger