Hedge Funds That Bet on Big Trends Are Trying to Bounce Back

Greg Coffey’s hedge fund firm, Kirkoswald Asset Management, gained 28% for clients in 2019. That’s a decent profit by any standard, but what makes it more impressive is that Coffey is what’s known as a macro investor. That’s a tough trade to ply.

It wasn’t always this way. The macro style used to be synonymous with the hedge fund industry. Imagine a money manager sitting in judgment on the entire world, sifting through trends in global economies and geopolitics to make big bets on everything from currencies to interest rates to stock indexes. That’s macro. Its roots go all the way back to economist John Maynard Keynes, who had a side gig in the 1920s running money for the endowment of King’s College, Cambridge. Take any titanic economic event of the past century, and there was a macro manager making a reputation by profiting from it: The fall of the British pound had George Soros; the 1987 stock market crash had Paul Tudor Jones; and the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 had Alan Howard.