Since BarclayHedge started collecting data in 1997, the best year recorded by macro managers was 1999, when they averaged gains of 20.2%; the worst was in 2011, when they were down 3.7%. This reflects the strategy’s fairly contained performance range.

Comparing five-year trailing correlation with the market to the past year, global macro performance is diverging from the S&P 500, having shifted from 0.62 to 0.12. This makes global macro the hedge fund strategy that is the second-least correlated to the S&P 500.

One of the most extreme macro funds that’s least correlated to the market is the Singapore-based Quantedge Global Fund. It has generated the highest returns within the macro space, along with the greatest volatility.

While the fund’s management declined to be interviewed for this story, it did provide a recent pitch book that outlines the billion-dollar-plus fund’s approach to investing.

The managers embrace risk, targeting annual standard deviation of 30%. This makes the fund much more exposed than others to severe drawdowns—the amount a fund may lose before recovering to its previous high-water mark.

In a matter of just four months in 2008, Quantedge had lost nearly 45%. However, for the year, its performance was comparable to the industry average—down 22.6%.

Despite that loss, the fund has delivered annualized returns of over 30% since launching in October 2006. And over the past five years, returns have topped 40%, with slightly lower than average volatility.

Quantedge has achieved these numbers not through outsized bets, but through extreme diversification across scores of developed market stock and bond indices and a wide range of commodities and currencies. It relies on proprietary statistical models to project volatility, returns and the correlation between assets and aggressive capital rotation.

But this really doesn’t explain how management works—an understanding that’s requisite before moving into any investment. Still, Quantedge has demonstrated what is possible from extreme macro exposure.

Number two on our select list is Haidar Jupiter. Its annualized rate of return since starting up in January 2002 through March was 17.60%, with a worst drawdown of 17%. Where most macro funds have been struggling over the past five years, Haidar’s returns, like Quantedge’s, also accelerated—to nearly 30% a year. But it achieved growth with less volatility—under 17.

Said Haidar, the fund’s manager, says he generated higher profits during much of this time from a series of tactical trades that were more akin to relative value strategies than macro. They included leveraged exposure to the massive issuance of sovereign debt (which followed the financial crisis) before it came to auction.

 “We established short exposure, for example, to three-year bonds before they hit the market, when they tend to initially sell off,” Haidar says. “We then rotated long once the market absorbed these new securities and prices corrected.”

At the same time, he will have long exposure to 10- or 30-year bonds to hedge his interest rate risk. These perpetual trades, which he said are known as “supply concession trades,” accounted for about two-thirds of his profits.

Haidar also generated consistent returns through calendar trades—gaining long equity exposure for just several days at the end of each month—when institutional and retail assets typically flow into markets, juicing up prices of major equity indices in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Confident about the protracted availability of cheap money and believing the broad risk of bankruptcy was limited, he periodically sold North American high-yield, credit-default swaps.