Hedge fund performance dipped in July after a strong first-half of the year, with the overall weighted average return for funds at 0.5%.
Event driven funds – those funds that seek to exploit pricing inefficiencies that may occur before or after an event, of which there have been many – were the top performer in July, with a weighted average return of 2.7%.
Fixed income arbitrage and global macro also stood out performance wise, with a weighted average return of 1.4% and 1.3% respectively.
Meanwhile, equities saw more muted returns at 0.6%, according to the fund universe administered by the Citco group of companies.
In contrast to June’s performance of achieving a weighted average return of 1.9%, multi-strategy funds were relatively flat at 0.1%.
The only strategy in negative territory for the month was commodities at -1.7%.
On an assets under administration (AUA) basis, the majority of AUA buckets were positive, with only funds between $200-500m experiencing a negative weighted return at -0.1%.
Funds with between $1bn-$3bn (£740m-£2.2bn) of AUA had a weighted average return of 1.1% to top the board for the second consecutive month, while funds with more than $3bn of AUA came second at 0.4%.
Funds with sub $200m delivered at 0.2%, whilst $500m-$1bn of AUA were flat.
The rate of return spread fell to 6.4%, down from 7.3% in June – and down from last year’s July performance of 7.7%.
Hedge funds continued also to see a wave of activity in July, with the majority of the strategies seeing net inflows.
Overall, there was $16.4bn of subscriptions and $6.1bn of redemptions, resulting in net inflow of $10.3bn – with year-to-date (YTD) flows remaining positive – standing at $29.7bn.
Multi-strategy funds took further inflows in July at $8.9bn, taking their YTD tally to $25.3bn of net inflows – ahead of all other strategy types.
Emerging markets saw outflows of $0.1bn, with most other strategies showing minimal net inflows; arbitrage and global macro all saw inflows of $0.1bn, while fund of funds had inflows of $0.5bn, and equities had net inflows of $0.3bn.
On an AUA basis, the current trend of inflows into larger funds continued, as funds with more than $10bn+ of AUA had net inflows of $6.9bn in July, taking them to $27.7bn of net inflows YTD.
All other categories saw much lower net flows; funds with between $1bn-$5bn of AUA saw outflows of $1.9bn, followed by funds with $5bn-$10bn which had outflows of $1.1bn, and the smallest funds with under $1bn at $0.5bn.
Funds in Europe saw the highest net inflow in July, coming in at $5.1bn, followed by the Americas at $4.8bn. Meanwhile, funds in Asia had inflows of $0.4bn.
Comments