One of the best known sayings in trading is The Trend is your Friend. It is a motto for active stock market traders, for commodities traders, for Foreign Exchange and Fixed Interest traders. Managed Futures strategies look for, identify and then follow trends across a wide range of markets, dynamically adjusting the direction and size of positions to the volatility of the individual markets and in aggregate, to the volatility of the total market set traded. Being agnostic to the direction of these trends, managed futures managers have demonstrated an ability to perform in both rising and falling markets over the last 20 years. Therefore as a diversifier managed futures strategies have a role to play in any balanced portfolio.

This presentation introduces Managed Futures, explains the "managed" part of the strategy and examines how that strategy has navigated a range of individual markets within a number of asset classes recently. The presentation concludes with an example of how much a balanced portfolio can be improved by an allocation to a Managed Futures strategy.

Click here to see more videos from the Advisers Big Day Out 2015.