Hedge Fund Who’s Who – August 2017

This is the August, 2017 post in my series on biggest hedge funds by regulatory assets under management. To change it up a bit I have used data from a different part of the Form ADV to create a “Who’s Who” of hedge funds.

Form ADV Item 7.A.

Item 7.A. requires a RIA firm to provide information about itself and its related persons, including foreign affiliates. Related persons are advisory affiliates and any person that is under common control with the filing RIA. If a filer checks any of the boxes in this section, they also have to fill out the relevant section of Schedule D – one section for each affiliate. 12 separate items of information are required for each related entity.

The kinds of entities that show up here include broker-dealers, LLCs or partnerships that are, in turn, the GPs or managing members of the funds the fund manager advises, and related businesses serving different markets. Often the entities are easily recognizable as being related to the filing firm simply from their names, but not always. In fact, you might be surprised to find out who is related to whom. Useful information to know if you are marketing to these firms!

Affiliated Groups

I use the term “affiliated group” to refer to the group of entities that report each-other as financial industry affiliates. Some are quite small: Bridgewater’s affiliate group numbers three members. Others are large: Goldman Sachs reports about 180+ affiliates! In theory, each affiliate should report every other affiliate within the same group so you only need check one Form ADV. In practice, you end up having to check each Form as mistakes are made!

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.attributed to Yogi Berra

I tend to use the entity within the affiliated group that manages the most regulatory assets as the “anchor” for the group i.e. I name the group after that firm. As a result of newly updating my table of affiliated groups, I should be able to do a better job of grouping related hedge fund businesses in future posts.

For the table below (12 affiliate groups and 50 entities) and for the downloadable file (61 groups, 252 entities), I have stuck to my usual definition of a hedge fund: >75% by number of accounts or >75% by AUM are from pooled investment vehicles other than registered investment companies (i.e. mutual funds). I have also filtered out the related entities that do not themselves have an SEC CRD#.

I also have available a file including every RIA over $10bn AUM regardless of customer profile (491 affiliated groups) and all their affiliates (7083 of them) including each of the 16 different SEC “type” classifications for each affiliate. This provides a much more comprehensive who’s who.

An Example: Man Group AHL

AHL Partners, Man Group’s famous hedge fund, is a member of the Numeric Investors LLC affiliated group. Numeric reports higher regulatory AUM ($27bn) than AHL ($17bn) so it is the anchor for the group. The complete group is:

• Numeric Investors LLC ($27bn rAUM)
• GLG Partners LP ($21bn rAUM)
• AHL Partners LLP ($17bn rAUM)
• GLG LLC ($5.6bn rAUM)
• Silvermine Capital Management ($3.4bn rAUM)
• FRM Investment Management (USA) LLC ($1.4bn rAUM)
• AALTO Invest UK Ltd ($1.1bn rAUM)
• Man Solutions Ltd ($740m rAUM)
• Man Global Private Markets (USA) Inc ($320m rAUM)
• Man Investments Inc (Broker-Dealer)
• Man Investments AG (“Other investment advisor”)
• Man Asset Management (Ireland) Ltd (“Other investment advisor”)

I believe this kind of information is invaluable in prospecting and preparing for sales and marketing meetings at a senior level.

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

Get the complete file including 491 affiliated groups made up of 7083 entities! This file includes every RIA (regardless of customer profile) reporting over $10bn regulatory AUM prior to 2017-08-01. This file is available for $100 via PayPal. To purchase drop me a line via our contact form (opens in a new tab).

Hedge Fund Who’s Who for the 12 Largest Hedge Funds

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

Contact me to discuss customized reports and analysis.

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 pod of orcas from djmboxsterman a Pixabay contributor