Analysis-Cocoa rally and market tumult hoist systematic hedge funds ahead of their peers

Record cocoa prices and markets whipped around by inflation and geopolitics helped hedge funds using systematic strategies outperform their peers in the first quarter, according to industry players and investors. A systematic hedge fund manager uses coding and algorithms to determine whether to find trades strong enough to become market trends, unlike traditional managers who decide the trade themselves. These trend funds made an average gain of almost 9% in the first two months of 2024, versus the wider hedge fund industry's 2.6% gain, according to Barclays' prime brokerage, which tracked the performances of 40 "classic trend" hedge funds.