Hedge fund investors want managers who trade macro, says SocGen survey

By Nell Mackenzie

LONDON (Reuters) -Hedge funds that trade on big macroeconomic market swings have become a top pick for investors, according to a Societe Generale survey of 322 firms, against a backdrop of global markets roiled by tariff uncertainty and stop-start trade wars.

Half of the respondents polled said they would consider putting their money into discretionary global macro hedge funds in the next 12 months, the SocGen survey conducted between November 2024 and May 15 showed.

The private survey was sent to investors on Wednesday and was seen by Reuters on Friday.

The number of respondents expressing interest in putting money into macro hedge funds rose by around 9% compared with the bank's last survey in autumn 2024, the report said.

According to hedge fund research firm PivotalPath, global discretionary macro managers, not using systematic trading to come up with trade ideas, posted a return of around 7% on investment through April in 2025, compared with a flat performance by the wider universe of hedge funds.

Investor interest in equity market-neutral funds also grew roughly 10% since SocGen's autumn survey, the report showed.

These hedge funds trade a balance of stocks, trying to maintain a portfolio which neither positions them long nor short stock markets as a whole. A short bet expects an asset value to decline.

While global macro hedge funds taking discretionary bets often top this survey, the investors queried by SocGen expressed their highest enthusiasm for the strategy in two years, the bank data showed.

Crypto hedge funds garnered the least intent to invest from those surveyed, with just 6% of investors wishing to allocate to the strategy, the lowest proportion in two years.

Interest in multi-strategy hedge funds ticked up, with roughly around a third of investors surveyed interested in systematic and fundamental multi-strategy funds, up 5% and 4% respectively since the same time last year.

Multi-strategy hedge funds trade many different kinds of markets under one brand.

(Reporting by Nell Mackenzie; Editing by Dhara Ranasinghe and David Holmes)