As a result, some hedge funds closed their doors entirely, a handful of managers retired to greener pastures, and roughly half of all hedge funds lost money for investors.
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The rich continued to get richer in 2015 despite a tepid performance from US stocks, according to a ranking of the top 25 highest-earning hedge-fund maestros compiled by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine.
This year has been challenging for hedge funds, but some of their managers seem to be taking out their frustrations on publicly traded companies, to the detriment of investors.
The median take for the list of top 25 hedge fund earners was $275 million, the lowest level in five years.
Japan mandated hedge funds were the worst performers during the month, down 1.53% and 4.31% year-to-date, as the Bank of Japan chose to hold policy steady for the moment. Bridgewater is the largest hedge fund firm in the world, with $104 billion in hedge fund assets at the start of 2016. In 2015 both of Millennium’s multistrategy funds posted 12.5 percent gains.
“Though about half of all hedge funds lost value in 2015, some did quite well, and about half of the highest earning hedge fund managers used computer-generated investment strategies to produce their investment gains”, said Michael Paltz, editor of Institutional Investor, which produces the annual survey of hedge fund manager earnings. Instead, John Overdeck and David Siegel, who run the data and technology-driven investment firm Two Sigma, made an appearance for the first time, earning $500 million each.
Over the 15 years of the Rich List, hedge fund managers on the ranking have made a total of $192.5 billion.
In what the magazine described as a hard year for hedge funds, that was enough for Griffin to tie with Renaissance Technologies founder James Simons for the top spot.
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The Institutional Investor’s Alpha ranking includes management and performance fees, as well as returns on money that managers invest in their own funds.
