In spite of a difficult month for the equity markets, including last week’s major hiccup, long-bias hedge funds helped push the MSCI Hedge Invest Index up 0.53% in February.

The investable index beat out the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, which fell 1.96% in February,  for the third straight month, boosting it’s year-to-date return to 2.08%, also besting the S&P 500’s 0.81% decline for 2006 so far. It also topped the MSCI World Equities Index, which rose 0.57% in February.

Event-driven funds were the top-performing strategy in February, returning 3.21% on the month (5.29% year-to-date). Discretionary trading (1.21%, 2.13% YTD), convertible arbitrage (1.03%, 2.04% YTD), variable-bias (0.96%, 2.39% YTD) and long-bias (0.82%, 2.46% YTD) also posted strong months. Only systematic trading funds were in the red, but they were deep in the red, falling 2.39% in February to wipe out January’s jump.