Hedge Funds Caught Massively Offside During Last Week’s Turmoil

Talk about bad timing.

Speculators were caught offside in both bonds and stocks last week, increasing their bets against U.S. Treasuries and buying more equity exposure right before a bout of volatility caused the exact opposite moves.

“Everyone was selling bonds and buying equities and both those trades went the other way,” says Michael Purves at Tallbacken Capital Advisors LLC. “To me what’s interesting is how extreme these charts got. Hedge funds, which are often the big engines of market moves (they may not be the core backbone of it but they might amplify it), have been beaten up so much this year.”

The most recent positioning data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission shows that leveraged funds increased their bets against Treasuries by the most since April 2020 as of Nov. 30 — just a couple days before the yield on the benchmark 10-year dropped to as low as 1.33%.

Meanwhile, bets on U.S. equities also increased with E-mini S&P 500 futures seeing net buying of 56,000 contracts — the biggest long position since late 2018 — right before the index dropped sharply.

The price action is stirring memories of of 2018, when everything from hawkish signals from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to worries over U.S.-China trade combined to spark a fourth-quarter sell off that slammed stocks and had traders pondering the outlook for risk assets.