Things definitely were heating up in hedge fund land last month. The first returns are in and all substrategies of the Dow Jones Hedge Fund Strategy Benchmarks and the Hedge Fund Research Index, which overall grew 2.45% in January, were in positive territory – including last year's dog, convertible arbitrage. (Dow Jones provided no overall average.) Of course, it's too early to extrapolate an entire year based on one month, but DJ's equity long/short rose 4.1%, the best of that bunch, and HFRX's market-directional climbed 4.34%, followed by its macro index at 3.66%. Convertible arbitrage was up a healthy 1.9% and 1.44% at Dow Jones and HFRX, respectively. The weakest performer in both was equity market neutral, with DJ at 0.6% and HFRX's at 0.17%.