Hedge funds may have enjoyed their first month of positive flows into the class in February this year gaining $1.63 billion but year to date assets are still in negative territory.

The information was published by eVestment, a provider of alternative asset information. The firm said: "February is traditionally a bellwether month for hedge fund industry  performance for the rest of the year, and February 2019 was worst the February for net flows in a decade."

Given the performance of hedge funds throughout 2018 it's not hard to see where investor dissatifaction is coming from. Investors are fleeing from macro and managed futures strategies, with  two thirds of reporting managers seeing redemptions pressures in 2019.

Long/short equity strategies also experienced net redemptions during February although there was a glimmer of hope for multi-strategy fund strategies, with this segment attracting net flows of $5.41 billion.

Even emerging markets, which have rallied this year, only attracted hedge fund money into fixed income and credit opportunities. Evestment said that the capital raising in emerging markets 'remains difficult'.

Last month's brief reprisal of hedge fund losses saw the industry's assets go up by $20.6 billion to $3.2 trillion according to eVestment's figures. It seems that hedge funds still have a lot of ground to make up if they want to secure the large institutional investors such as Calpers which famously pulled their assets out of the class a few years ago.

However, Bill Ackman's Pershing Square has had a good year which goes to show if you place your big bets in the right places, it can pay off. His fund returned 25.3 percent to March 2019 beating its benchmark S&P 500 which returned 13.5 percent.