Biggest Hedge Funds By Assets Under Management July 2017

This is the July, 2017 post in my series on biggest hedge funds by regulatory assets under management. To change it up a bit I have included in the table below the mid-year regulatory $AUM for each firm for 2012 through 2017 inclusive. I have also plotted the change in $AUM for some of the largest hedge funds. I selected the funds reported in the June 26, 2017 issue of Business Insider.

The broad analysis is based on the 227 registered investment advisor firms that are:

• At least $10bn discretionary regulatory assets under management
• At least 75% by number of clients are pooled investment vehicles other than investment companies, or
• At least 75% by regulatory assets under management are pooled investment vehicles other than investment companies

These criteria capture most, but not all, of the famous hedge funds, but also scoop up some firms you might not think of as hedge funds at all.

Observations

Before we get to the table, let’s take a look at a couple of charts.

Absolute Value of Regulatory AUM

The first shows the evolution over time of the reported value of regulatory assets under management for 8 fund managers. This is a subset of the 11 largest hedge fund by AUM reported in the June 26, 2017 issue of Business Insider. Why only 8 of the 11? Because one of the firms is AQR which does not meet the criteria above for defining a hedge fund (they manage too many 40 Act funds). Two others (Man Group and J P Morgan Asset Management) do not have a complete series of data for 2012 through 2017. Here’s the chart:

The gap between the top two, Bridgewater and Millennium, and the rest is remarkable. Bear in mind two things:

• There are a number of firms that fill this gap (you can find them in the table below) but they are not in Business Insider’s list of largest hedge funds.
• These figures are regulatory $AUM reported on Form ADV. These figures reflect the size of the firm’s securities portfolio and cash – there’s leverage.

Relative Value of Regulatory AUM

The next chart uses the same AUM data as the first, but scaled to start at 100. This enables us to see the relative growth of each manager’s funds under management:

The standout here is Two Sigma whose securities portfolio has grown by over 2.5 times in the last five years. I want caution against reading too much into this as part of the growth maybe increased leverage. Whatever the cause, their securities portfolio has changed in a significantly different way to their competitors.

To a lesser extent, Och-Ziff also seems to be going against the grain having dropped in these relative rankings from second to last over the most recent two periods. Searching the headlines may provide some insights.

And the world’s biggest hedge funds by regulatory assets under management are …

The table below contains the largest 50 firms sorted in descending order of July 2017 regulatory assets under management. The table also includes the AUM reported as close to mid-year as was available for each of the years 2012 through 2016. So you can complete your own version of the charts above for any managers you choose.

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The July file is no longer available. The button will deliver the current version.

Table of 50 Largest Firms Over $10bn AUM

Note: click column headings to sort. Use drop-down to set number of rows per page.

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Companion Post: Mining for Gold

I have published a companion post on the Form ADV and the information it provides for competitive analysis and benchmarking (Hedge Fund Competitor Intelligence: Mining for Gold in Form ADV).

Check out your own firm’s Form ADV at the SEC’s Investment Advisor Public Depository website – you may be surprised at how much information is in there.

Image: A royalty free image of a Humpback whale from tpsdave a Pixabay contributor