(Bloomberg) — Hedge fund managers have complained all year about a lack of liquidity and volatile markets in explaining some of the worst performance since the financial crisis.
Yet a handful of multibillion-dollar firmsincluding Blackstone Group LP, D.E. Shaw, Millennium Partners and Citadel have managed to side-step those problems and post double-digit returns.
— Fund Assets under management Jan.-Nov. Return Strategy Blackstone Senfina $792 mln 23% equity Citadel main funds $15 bln 12.6% multistrategy Passport Special Opportunities $430 mln 11.6% equity Millennium Partners $33 bln 11.1% multistrategy D.E. Shaw Oculus $10.1 bln 10.2% macro Source: fund documents, people familiar
— Many of the big winners are firms that allocate money to multiple teams investing across a broad range of markets, with each group managing just a fraction of the total assets. This years biggest losers include managers with concentrated portfolios, who piled into the same equities — Cheniere Energy Inc., Williams Cos., SunEdison Inc. and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. — before they tumbled in the second half of the year.
In 2015, a lot of the underperformance can be explained through crowding, said Stan Altshuller, chief research officer at Novus Partners, which analyzes portfolio data for hedge funds and other investors. Hedge funds represented almost half of the market cap of some of these companies.
Multi-Team Funds
The top performer among the multiteam funds is Blackstones Senfina Advisors, which started with stock-focused managers in 2014. It has fewer than 10 teams managing money now, according to a person familiar with the fund. Tom Hill, vice chairman at Blackstone, said last year he expects the fund to run several billion dollars by the end of 2016.
Izzy Englanders Millennium, which runs $33 billion over 180 teams, is on track to produce its third consecutive year of double-digit returns, performance that helped the firm attract a net $4.1 billion so far this year.
Citadel, run by Ken Griffin, hasnt returned less than 11 percent a year since the financial crisis, when it lost 54 percent. Its teams manage money across credit, stocks, fixed income, macro, commodities and quantitative strategies.
Overall, hedge funds have barely made money this year through November, and are heading for their worst performance since 2011, when they lost 5.2 percent. By comparison, the Standard & Poors 500 Index returned 3 percent through November, intermediate U.S. Treasuries gained 2 percent and commodities, as measured by a Bloomberg index, have slumped 22 percent.
Some of the best known hedge fund managers have posted losses as bad or even worse than in 2008. David Einhorns Greenlight Capital is poised for its second losing year in almost two decades after dropping about 21 percent through November. Bill Ackman told investors that 2015 is on track to be the worst year ever for his Pershing Square Capital Management, with a loss similar to Greenlights.
Some high-profile funds have closed this year as well, primarily from wrong-way currency bets, including macro funds run by Fortress Investment Group, Bain Capital and Blackrock Inc. Michael Platts Bluecrest Capital Management, once one of Europes biggest hedge funds, told clients this year it would return money and focus on managing Platts wealth and that of his employees.
Officials for the hedge fund firms declined to comment on performance.
