...if by 'tough' you mean that they top 25 managers only made $11 billion
Each year Institutional Alpha puts together a list of the 25 hedge fund managers who earned the most and they say this year was when investors finally fell out of love with hedge funds.
It was the third year of net redemptions and the top 25 managers only made $11 billion, which is the worst since 2005. That sounds like a lot, and it truly is an ungodly sum, but it's down from nearly a billion each in 2013.
The truly amazing one is James Simons, who has been on this list since it started 16 years ago. Renaissance proved again last year that it's on a different level from everyone else with another year of double-digit returns in its main funds. The quant fund is also in the news lately because founder Ray Mercer has now turned his data genius towards elections. He's seen by some as the architect of Trump's win and is a close associate of Steve Bannon and all of Trump's closest campaign team. The Guardian has now connected him to the Brexit vote as well, which could be illegal. He's using big data to target voters and so far his results appear to be as strong as his hedge fund.
Other notes:
- We wrote about Paul Singer recently because he raised $5 billion in less than 24 hours
- Tepper and Griffin both underperformed the S&P 500
- Half of the top-25 earners posted single-digit returns in 2016 compared to 9.54% for the S&P 500
- 13 members of last year's top-25 are back
- A separate list from Forbes
- One name not on the list is Warren Buffett because he's not technically a public fund manager, he's a CEO. But he earned more than everyone in the top-25 combined by adding $13.7 billion on a 23% rise in Berkshire Hathaway, according to Matt Levine.
- The cutoff for the top-50 was $30 million
- Bill Ackman didn't make the list and has had double-digit losses for two years in a row
