There have been few things to smile about this year. But here’s one. An index based on US stocks has outperformed the total returns of the S&P 500 by 51.7 percentage points over the first 11 months of the year. Over the past three years, its annualised outperformance was nearly 17 percentage points; over the past five years, it was more than 13 percentage points.

Société Générale’s SGI Wise US Long-Short Index, which was introduced in early April, has been able to outpace the broad market in all kinds of conditions, revealed by back testing to 1992. Since then, its annualised return was 13.2 per cent through the end of November versus 6.5 per cent for the S&P 500.