Fresh data shows March was a particularly good month for investors in emerging market hedge funds.

Emerging Markets hedge funds led industry-wide gains in March, with the biggest jump since May 2009, according to Hedge Fund Research.

The HFRI Emerging Markets Index increased 6.9 per cent during the month, offsetting steep losses from January. This brought year-to-date performance to 0.8 per cent. As for regional performance in emerging markets, Latin America, emerging Asia and Russia/Eastern Europe led the way with respective growth of 14.5 per cent, 6.8 per cent and 6.7 per cent.

Hedge funds delivered strong performance across equity, event driven and relative value strategies, with the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index rising 1.8 per cent last month, its strongest gain since February last year.

Rebounding from a shaky start to the year, hedge fund strategies with exposure to global equities finished the first quarter on a high, with the HFRI Equity Hedge Index adding 3.4 per cent in March, its strongest gain since January 2012.

“Equity and emerging market hedge funds led strong gains in March to conclude a volatile first quarter with two clear and distinct market cycles including a six-week equity, commodity and EM selloff to begin 2016, and an ongoing recovery from that sell-off,” said Kenneth Heinz, president of HFR.

“Conservative positioning and trend-following exposures served to insulate portfolios from declines intra-quarter, while resurgent equity and emerging markets posted strong gains to conclude the quarter.”

He added that macroeconomic volatility is expected to remain high, with drivers including the Brexit vote in June, the US elections and the surging Japanese yen.

“As a result, hedge funds are likely to remain strategically conservative and tactically opportunistic, adjusting exposures dynamically and continuously as trends develop and evolve,” he said.

Indeed, performance of macro hedge funds dipped in March. Still, macro remains the top strategy area of hedge fund performance in the first quarter after strong gains in January and February.