This report analyses the $ AUM employed per investment professional for the top 100 hedge funds by AUM. We also analyse the amount of leverage applied to AUM by strategy and firm.
Hedge funds are notoriously guarded about disclosing AUM so without any public record we used a top 100 list published by Pensions & Investments which can be found here. We also supplemented this with ADV filings as close to 30th June 2021 as possible to analyse regulated assets under management (i.e. with leverage). We had to exclude the following because of incomplete data on the split between hedge fund & public funds, regulated AUM or staff numbers.
- BlackRock
- Wellington Management
- PIMCO
- Acadian Asset Mgmt.
- P. Morgan Asset Mgmt.
- TCI Fund Mgmt.
- Brevan Howard Asset Mgmt.
- CQS
- Statar Capital
Fund $ AUM per Investment Professional
In top spot by some distance, Universa Investments, run by Mark Spitznagel and advised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, manages an impressive $12b with just 5 investment professionals. Impressively for a systematic fund, Versor splits just over $3b between 3 investment professionals.
The distribution of $ AUM per investment professional was concentrated in the $100-500m range with 44% of funds sitting in the $100-250m range and 23% in the $250-500m range. The strategy mix was pretty diverse.
Unlike the $0-100m range where 9 out of the bottom 10 were multi-strategy firms. It’s unsurprising that AUM is distributed more broadly given the size of the large multi strats however this is rectified by the significant leverage that Multi Strats employ.
Leverage
The average amount of leverage across the universe of 96 (Man, Marshall Wace, Capula and Winton did not have ADV filings) was 3 x AUM shrinking to just over 2 x AUM if we exclude the top five. The biggest outlier was Mariner Investments which was leveraged 34 times their AUM. We would love to be able to explain how they pack such a punch but I think that’s probably a question for their PB. Another couple of outliers at the bottom were Greenlight Capital and Aspect who were deploying only half of their AUM.
If we remove the top 10, that skew the figures, the distribution of leverage across the remaining 90 was as follows:
* Please note Man, Marshall Wace, Capula and Winton are included in 0-0.5 leverage range as we did not have ADV filings and therefore unable to calculate based on regulated AUM.
Regulated AUM per Investment Professional
If we compare the top 10 before and after leverage there is quite a bit of movement with Mariner Investments, Garda Capital, Lighthouse Partners and Nephilia Capital punching above their weight.
The distribution across strategies showed the bulk of investment professionals employing discretionary equity strategies sit within the $100-500m range.
Additional Information
If you would like to access the complete data set broken down by strategy type please click here
