World's Biggest Hedge Funds Crushed By Oil Price Surge
We knew something was off when Bloomberg reported yesterday that Balyasny's chief commodities strategist, Damien Courvalin, whom the multi-strat hedge fund poached from Goldman in 2023 after a 16-year span at the bank where he led the bank’s oil research and become one of the most prominent oil analysts on Wall Street, had left the hedge fund where he oversaw the fimr's central commodities intelligence effort, including implementation in cross-commodity portfolios, after the rollercoaster moves in oil.
We are just guessing, but Courvalin may have been just a bit bearish on oil: after all, he led Goldman’s research when the bank predicted, correctly, a price plunge in early 2020, just before oil prices fell below zero. He also covered gold, agriculture, natural gas and commodity asset allocation through his tenure at the bank.
There is another reason why Courvalin was likely bearish: according to Bloomberg, his (now former) employer Balyasny Asset Management declined by 3.5% last week after a 0.4% increase in the two months through February.
It wasn't just Balysani: according to Bloomberg, some of the world’s biggest hedge funds suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses last week after the war against Iran sent oil prices surging and triggered wild market moves, suggesting that short oil was among the most consensus trades within the hedge fund world, something we warned about in late 2025.
Between A Dock & A Hard Place: Record Short Oil Positions Squeezed By Sanctions Despite Record Crude Glut On-Water https://t.co/SBIBo0JY5Y
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 27, 2025
According to the report, Citadel’s main Wellington hedge fund lost 2% last week, with its macro business suffering declines. The fund was up 2.9% through February. ExodusPoint’s multistrategy hedge fund last week gave away all the gains it had notched up for the year; it had been up 2.6% in the first two months.
Other multi-strats also got crushed: Izzy Englander's Millennium Management, which manages $86.7 billion, lost about $1.5 billion in the week through March 6, leaving it up just 0.75% this year through March 6. It had advanced 2% in the first two months. At Steve Cohen's Point72, the 1.1% decline during the week cut its advance this year through March 6 to 3.4%. Marshall Wace’s flagship Eureka hedge fund was down 3.7% last week, paring gains for the year to 2.4%, according to another person.
The Iran war sparked general market mayhem, as stocks, bonds and other asset classes saw a broad selloff since the US and Israel launched a series of strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, targeting the country’s leadership and strategic sites. Crude oil touched almost $120 a barrel earlier this week on concerns of output cuts as the conflict escalated before declining on Trump’s assurance that the war would resolve “very soon.” A weak jobs report out of the US and renewed anxiety about the private-credit industry also weighed on investor sentiment.
Hedge funds also suffered a blow from their bets on the UK rates market as well, as the strife in the Middle East forced a dramatic reassessment of Bank of England policy expectations and led to the worst week in more than three years. The policy-sensitive two-year gilt yield rocketed about 35 basis points in the five days through March 6 and continued to soar further on Monday.
As extreme market volatility continues, expect to see more bad news for funds who are not prepared for this kind of trading environment. The question is whether the degrossing associated with adapting to a surge in the vix will also lead to a reduction in the huge basis trade which has long been the biggest driver of profit for the multi-strat community, and whose blow up in March 2020 forced the Fed to step in with massive bailouts.