Hedge Fund Focus: August 12, 2016
In case you missed them, here are the hot topics in the hedge fund space this week…
Confirming HFR’s findings last week, eVestment and EurekaHedge also reported industry gains in July. eVestment has the industry up 1.89 percent for the month, putting managers up 3.29 percent YTD, and EurekaHedge has the industry up 1.52 percent for the month and 2.55 YTD.
Despite finally seeing a performance rally, Eurekahedge also found that managers did not do a stellar job at stock picking during H1 this year, losing a total of $5.2B during this period.
CTAs continue to standout and attract new capital as they hold on to first place this year and investors feel they are more fee efficient.
For manager performance, Brevan Howard is down 1 percent YTD, Renaissance gained 3.1 percent in July putting it up 17 percent YTD and Viking brought in similar gains trimming yearly losses to just over 3 percent. However, Jana Partners was not so lucky, as the firm is down 12 percent for the last 19 months.
We continue to see mixed findings about flows, but according to new research from Barclays this week investors are not leaving hedge funds, at least not as quickly as some reports have indicated. According to the British bank, despite fund liquidations being on the rise, only one-quarter of investors said their hedge fund investments did not meet their expectations between 2014 and 2016. Additionally, Callan Associates found that despite equities’ rally, investors continue to shift into alternative strategies and SS&C GlobeOp reported a 0.7 percent uptick in institutional capital.
In other research, Barclays also found that poor industry performance is not due to too many funds in the market but the size of funds instead.
And finally, Bill Ackman just can’t catch a break. The luminary activist manager, who has been taking performance hits partly due to his investment in Valeant, just got another hit from the floundering company this week as it was reported that three major executives are leaving.