By Caitlin McCabe

Happy with your stock returns this week? You can thank the quants for that.

Systematic hedge funds known as commodity trading advisors, or CTAs, bought $86 billion worth of global equities over the past five sessions, according to a note from Goldman Sachs sent to clients Thursday. That marked one of the largest five-day buying sprees on record from the group.

These funds, also known as trend followers, use computer algorithms to spot patterns in asset prices, then ride them up or down. They often trade highly liquid products like futures.

As I wrote last week, Goldman's models were suggesting that CTAs were on the precipice of a massive buying spree as they closed out short positions and flipped long. But the degree of buying over the past five sessions exceeds the bank's predictions.

The last three times that CTAs have bought at such a level, stocks usually pulled back in the near term but did well over the following months. On average, the S&P 500 was up 2.2% one month later and 8.2% three months later, Goldman noted.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 17, 2026 09:36 ET (13:36 GMT)

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