The Great Hedge-Fund Contraction
dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com
March 5, 2009, 1:15 pm
There’s a big hole in the hedge fund industry, as nearly $1 trillion in assets has disappeared over the last six months of 2008, according to a study.
A combination of poor performance and investors’ withdrawals led to a 33 percent drop in the assets managed by hedge funds last year, according to a report by HedgeFund Intelligence. Hedge funds now manage a total of $1.8 trillion, and that amount could drop by another 20 percent or more this year as investors continue pulling out their money, the study says. The full report will be published next month.
The bulk of the shrinkage came in the second half of the year, as the failure of Lehman Brothers and a plummeting stock market took a huge toll on hedge fund performance. Hedge funds, on average, were down 15 percent last year, although the numbers are skewed by a significant minority of firms that had huge gains.
Other findings from the report included a decline is the billion-dollar club. That refers to the number of firms with $1 billion or more under management, which shrank to 311 from 395 at the beginning of the year. HedgeFund Intelligence also identified 353 hedge funds that were shut down in 2008 in Europe and the Americas.
Below, the study’s list of the largest hedge fund firms, as measured by the assets under management as of Jan 1, 2009. (Assets are in billions of dollars.)
– Zachery Kouwe
Firm Assets: Bridgewater Associates $38.6 JPMorgan 32 Paulson & Company 29 D.E. Shaw Group 28.6 Brevan Howard 28.6 Och-Ziff Capital Management 22.1 Man AHL 22 Soros Fund Management 21 Goldman Sachs Asset Management 20.6 Farallon Capital Management 20 Renaissance Technologies 20 |
