Relatively speaking, managed futures were the darling of the financial crisis when they were the ultimate zig (the Altegris 40 managed futures index gained more than 15 percent) to the stock market’s zag (the S&P 500 Index plunged 37 percent) in 2008.

Afterward, investors clamored for managed futures products and the investment management industry complied with scores of products —mainly mutual funds—to meet the demand. Unfortunately, it was a case of bad timing because managed futures are designed to shine when traditional asset classes stumble (a concept known as “crisis alpha”), and we’ve been in an equity bull market since March 2009.

In other words, people who invested in managed futures have bought protection that hasn’t been needed, and by and large these products have been on the wrong side of the trend for the past decade.

But all good things must come to an end and there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on right now economically and politically, and so this might not be a bad time to launch an exchange-traded fund based on managed futures.

That brings us to the iM DBi Managed Futures Strategy ETF (DBMF), whose managers officially told the world on Thursday that it had launched even though it began trading on May 8 and already has roughly $15.3 million in assets. Its expense ratio is 0.85 percent

DBMF is an actively managed fund that seeks to benefit from the trading strategies of leading commodity trading advisor (CTA) hedge funds.

CTAs oversee client assets in proprietary managed futures programs that trade an array of futures contracts in more than 150 global markets ranging from currencies and commodities to stock indexes and interest rates, and they can take both long and short positions. The name of the game is to construct broadly diversified portfolios in an attempt to provide a non-correlated hedge against traditional stocks and bonds.

The DBMF fund employs a proprietary quantitative model that approximates the current asset allocations of a selected pool of the largest CTAs, and then invests in a portfolio of long and short positions in domestically-traded, liquid derivative contracts as determined by the fund’s sub-advisor, Dynamic Beta Investments, a New York City-based hedge fund advisory with $264 million in assets under management as of April 30.

The fund’s sponsor is iM Global Partner, a global multi-boutique investment platform that has strategic minority investments in five asset managers—one of them being Dynamic Beta Investments. It has offices in Paris, London and Philadelphia.

Days Of Futures Passed

There are six managed futures ETFs, according to ETFdb.com. The largest by far is the WisdomTree Managed Futures Strategy Fund (WTMF), which launched in January 2011 and has $232 million in assets.

The bogey for all of these funds, as assigned by Morningstar, is the Credit Suisse Managed Futures Liquid Total Return USD Index. That index has average annual returns of 1.6 percent, minus-2.58 percent and 3.55 percent during the past one-, three- and five-year periods.

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