FundMonitors’ FY26 alternatives review ranked the ECCM Systematic Trend Fund first in its category, citing a 31.17% return. Only 10 of 31 funds in the category beat the peer-group return of 11.31%.
In a recent Investor Strategy News article, ECCM CEO Simone Haslinger explains what a strongly trending year confirms about systematic trend following.
What trend following does
Trend following identifies price trends already underway across equities, bonds, commodities and currencies, and rides them until they break. FY26 gave the strategy an unusually clean set of trends to work with.
Haslinger was quoted by Investor Strategy News: “In FY26 markets gave us what systematic trend following is designed to capture: genuine, sustained moves. We experienced significant trends in precious metals, technology-linked equity indices, and earlier in 2026, energy markets.”
The evidence behind the strategy
The strategy rests on time series momentum, the tendency of an asset’s own past return to predict its next. This isn’t a new idea. Academic research testing 58 liquid futures and forward markets across equities, currencies, commodities and bonds documented the same pattern, giving systematic trend its modern footing as an investable return premium.
Other research has reconstructed trend-following returns back to 1880. It found the strategy positive in every decade studied, and most valuable during the deepest equity and bond drawdowns of the past century. That property is often called crisis alpha, or convexity. It’s the reason trend following earns a place in a diversified portfolio.
In the article, Haslinger added: “A disciplined, rules-based approach can deliver real diversification benefits precisely when investors need them most.”
Differentiating trend managers
Because the return driver behind trend following is a well-documented pattern rather than a proprietary secret, the real differentiator between managers is implementation, risk control, cost and capacity.
The result confirms that ECCM followed FY2026’s trends, and followed them well. Its three- and five-year record places ECCM among the category’s best.
Whether systematic trend belongs in an institutional portfolio was settled long before this result, and on different evidence: not what the strategy returns when markets trend, but what it does when they break.
Read the original article on Investor Strategy News here.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.