Superior Data Management to Drive 2025 Macro Hedge Fund Strategies

Macro hedge funds are the grand strategists of the financial world. Their primary edge lies in their ability to exploit macroeconomic trends such as central bank policies, interest rate movements, inflation cycles, and wars — both trade and literal wars. A recent study indicated global discretionary macro topped 2025 strategies,¹ with 42% of respondents planning allocations — and another 35% planning quantitative global macro allocations in the next year. Macro funds taking advantage of volatile markets have enjoyed outsized results so far in 2025, according to Reuters.²

The roaring (20)20s have given us, if nothing else, an era of perpetual crises. The ground remains fertile for macro strategy hedge funds to continue thriving in disruptions. The pandemic catalyzed disruptions in oil, credit, and FX, a bonanza for funds that correctly bet on central bank actions and volatility. Extreme commodities market movements followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 2024 became the year of national elections, with funds placing bets on the US result, which has rolled out the carpet for greater volatility in regulations, trade policy, and changing geopolitics.

Here is a macro look into 2025 macro hedge fund strategies, sub-strategies, and trends. We break down the challenges in driving macro strategies and how to solve them with modern data management practices and technology.

A growing macro hedge fund ecosystem

The barrier to entry is high in the macro ecosystem with high leverage requirements. In a sharply competitive space, only the most talented managers can consistently outperform the competition and attract investors. However, at the end of January, Bloomberg reported that some of the world’s most sought-after hedge funds are returning billions of dollars to clients. Point72 Asset Management, Citadel, and Element Capital Management are returning about $15 billion as “they try to remain agile enough to move in and out of their bets.”³ A recent Bank of America survey indicated that investors expressed concern about hedge funds growing too large to execute trades efficiently without significantly influencing the market.⁴

The growth of large macro hedge funds opens up new opportunities for their competitors to scoop up the leftovers, and perhaps for smaller and medium-sized hedge funds to bulk up their AUM or launch new funds, like MapleCap, the new $100 million macro Palinuro Capital, and the new discretionary capital macro fund, Kate Capital.⁵

Macro-strats continued growth:

• Macro sub-strategy asset increases in 4Q24 were led by multi-strategy and systematic diversified funds, increasing by $3.4 billion and $2.0 billion, respectively.
• The HFRI Macro (Total) Index posted a gain of +5.65 percent for 2024, led by the HFRI Macro: Multi-Strategy Index which gained +7.8 percent.⁶
• For FY 2024, total macro strategy capital increased by $40.7 billion.

Smaller funds can gain entry with advanced investment technology

Macros are a thinking person’s investment strategy, especially discretionary macros. The tussle for talented analysts, traders, and portfolio managers (PM) is fierce, and the most ingenious people are attracted to larger firms and their vast resources, which are required to run this strategy. Data storage and data processing costs can be substantial. Ambitious macro funds can distinguish themselves if they are armed with an integrated data platform. Unified data will enable time- and salary-saving operational efficiencies and enhance speed-to market, thus attaining distinctive value more swiftly.

Flexible data infrastructure to scale and compete

Hedge funds of all sizes need to optimize their data infrastructure to manage capital deployment effectively to have a shot of competing — and scaling. For example, an opportunistic multi-strategy fund, which tends to go where the money is, can use access to macro strategies as a differentiator in the marketplace, allocating more to sub-PMs who specialize in global macro strategies. 

Meanwhile, smaller, perhaps more niche funds can seize opportunity in the gaps left from large funds returning capital back to investors by incorporating fixed-income or commodities-specific macro approaches⁷ that look for longer term trends and supply and demand imbalances in commodity markets. The highest performing hedge funds, no matter the size, will have the most flexible technology for scaling, whether it be adding investors, asset classes, PMs, geographies, counterparties, or new strategies like global macro.

Macro hedge funds: strategies for volatility

Volatility could very well be the number one trend in macro hedge funds this year. Macro holdings are typically structured to capitalize on a specific outcome of international economic or political events, but they can also be designed to generate profits from broader market volatility.⁸ With the Fed pulling back on potential rate cuts and an increased demand for strategies with large collateral reserves, commodities trading advisors (CTA) could get a boost because they trade futures across commodities, currencies, equity indexes, and interest rates. In fact, the largest positive change in funds’ strategy interest in 2024 was commodities, which saw an 11% bump, according to Societe Generale North America’s survey report.⁹

CTAs that run long volatility strategies stand to gain directly from market fluctuations. They often increase exposure to treasuries and cash-like reserves during volatility spikes. However, a macro PM looking to exploit volatility must have the capability to identify mispricing in options markets, bond spreads, and credit risk premia. To do so, PMs must have the automated tools to conduct data-driven, multi-dimensional risk assessment on volatility and liquidity.

For macro funds looking to capitalize on global debt trends,¹⁰ data is the ultimate weapon to anticipate central bank moves, detect sovereign stress, and exploit dislocations across rates, FX, credit, and commodities. The PMs pursuing these highly sophisticated macro sub-strategies must be able execute swiftly, an improbability if they are using legacy systems.

Trade in any and all asset-classes and investment models

The higher risk, sophisticated nature of macro investment decisions — based on PMs’ 30,000-foot view of the world and relative valuations of financial instruments within or between asset classes — necessitates thoughtful data analysis at ground level, on asset class correlations and how relative valuations shift across asset classes. In today’s digitized capital markets system, a PM who has not supplied holistic, comprehensive investment lifecycle technology to their middle- and back-offices has not set them up for success. PMs, quants, analysts, accountants, and risk management professionals rely on clean, consistent, actionable investment data on positions, cash, margins, PnL attribution at a strategy level, and margin and financing attribution.

Investment varieties are increasing, and entity and investment structures are becoming more complex, compounding data management headaches in recordkeeping, accounting, and reporting. Funds have an urgent need for systems that connect middle- and back-office data and operations, so they can frequently measure fund performance, synthesize attribution, and conduct meaningful analyses.

Data is the Alpha and Omega

In a highly regulated business where speed, accuracy, and transparency are the most coveted attributes in a firm, there is no competitive advantage in postponing modernization of data or operational infrastructure in favor of the status quo of manual, spreadsheet-based workflows. Legacy systems do not offer the agility to move into new asset classes or identify and exploit opportunities before the rival funds. PMs working with a lack of confidence in their data or an overreliance on fund administrators’ data with no visibility as to its lineage are flying in fog if not blind.

In 2025, quality data is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Macros that want to run complex strategies don’t bet on narratives — they trade hard data. The right combination of fiscal, monetary, FX, credit, and inflation data can unlock billion-dollar trades. See our recent article to find out more about Assessing Technology Sophistication in Hedge Funds.

Reaching the velocity of success

Hedge funds that distinguish themselves from the rest will be the ones that empower investment teams with streamlined data integration for real-time investment strategies adjustments and enhanced analytics. This becomes a reality only through adopting domain-specific data models, designed with built-in intelligence on asset classes, lifecycle events, and geographic nuances. Simply put, they can leverage the value of their mountains of data to drive growth and create innovative products.