Top 20 Hedge Funds List

Excellent 2015 edition of the Barron’s Best 100 Hedge Funds list.

Many of the funds on the list fly under the radar on WSO. I am sure that people working in the industry have heard about most of those these funds, but probably ca. 50% have never been discussed/mentioned around here.

Equities dominate the rankings for the second straight year. Larry Robbins’ Glenview Offshore Opportunity fund claimed the #1 spot, with an impressive three-year annualized gain of 57%.

Top 20:

Full list of top 100 best performing hedge funds in 2014:
Barron's Best 100 Hedge Funds in 2014

According to BarclayHedge, the average hedge fund returned 7.36% annualized over the three years ended in 2014 (Barron's benchmark). Average hedge fund management fee declined to 1.51% from 1.54% last year, while performance fees dropped to 17.8% from 18.2%, says HFR.

So how did Barron’s Penta identify these managers?

We initially screen out narrow industries and small regions, excluding funds that invest in only one sector or country, and we avoid commodity-focused funds. We will include Asian-Pacific funds, for example, but not China-centric ones. Gold or energy funds are omitted, but diversified commodity trading advisors (aka, managed futures) are considered. And to ensure that we are reporting the results of professionally run shops that offer stability and sufficient liquidity, funds must have at least $300 million and a three-year track record as of Dec. 31, 2014.

What do you guys think about the list? Any funds overlooked?

Some of the names like Glenview, Hildene and Chenavari have absolutely been killing it in the last few years.

 

So the top 100 hedge funds are outperformed by the S&P 500 this year and have only outperformed the general market by 0.80% over the last 3 years. Tell me how markets are inefficient again (let's ignore the average beta of these funds and liquidity considerations)?

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

We could debate this forever. Hedge funds are meant to be absolute return funds, not relative return ones such as long-only mutual funds. Hedge funds are really only compared to the S&P 500 by the media to make silly headlines, when in reality, they aim to surpass targets such as LIBOR+X bps within a certain band of volatility. To that end, funds run themselves at differing levels of net and gross exposures, depending on their leverage and mandates.

There are also different types of funds, such as distressed funds, that sometimes take longer for their theses play out. For example, Lehman Brothers was a gold mine, but the complexity of the company and the bankruptcy insure that these funds do a lot of work to get their excess returns. It certainly wouldn't make sense to compare a fund like that (or a quantitative global macro fund or an equity market neutral fund that has a beta of 0.02) to the S&P 500 and say that you are better/worse off.

 
abacaxi:

We could debate this forever.

They take more risk, typically suffer from illiquidity and, as demonstrated above, often have lower returns relative to that of the market. Debate over, but I get the need to defend your profession. Value investing is dead; markets are efficient.

Also, can we get an average Sharpe/Sortino ratio of the funds highlighted in the article? I doubt that they're less volatile than the overall market (not that a sane individual would pay that sort of risk-adjusted premium for their alleged 'stability' anyways).

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 
Simple As...:

Why are you all "debating" someone who's entire volume of knowledge about hedge funds seems to be gleaned from skimming Business Insider listicles?

People get so emotional in debates. Particularly those that don't have any real counter arguments. Thank you for your insightful contribution and for sharing your extensive knowledge on why Hedge Funds charge massive fees on returns that are lower than what a portfolio consisting of mature blue chips would offer.
“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 
Best Response

First of all you need to take a step back and look at who invests in hedge funds. By and large hedge funds investors are LPs that are massive pensions, endowments, family offices, etc. that are well diversified across asset classes. Alternative investments make up anywhere from 5-30% of these portfolios. Must of the money is invested in blue chip equities, IG fixed income etc. Alternative assets, HFs, PE, commodities, etc., provide diversification for the portfolio at large reducing volatility while increasing the returns of the overall portfolio. Looking at HFs as an asset class is too overly simplistic. An LP invested purely in low fee blue chip indexes would not do as well in the long run against and LP that had a more diversified portfolio across asset classes. When you talk to LPs they will say things like we need to get more exposure this [insert particular asset class] in our portfolio - likely because doing so moves them along the efficient frontier at a lower risk profile. Comparing HFs to indexes is really just click bait journalism. But hey, you must know more than the guys running ontario teachers, Calpers, Harvard endowment, etc.

This shit is basic.

 

Any update on how HFs have performed since 2015? Was there increasing fee pressure in that period? Was I wrong? Genuinely curious.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

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