2018 witnessed a slew of hedge fund closures – a vast majority of them because investors withdrew capital from these funds. With this in mind, we decided to explore the correlation between performance and AUM growth based on the strategies hedge funds adopt, and this is what we found–
Bottom-Up and Top-Down funds display a higher correlation between AUM changes and returns
Bottom up investing involves reviewing individual companies for specific attributes and then building a portfolio based on some fundamental criteria. Top down investors look at macroeconomic factors before they work their way down to individual stocks. Bottom-up, Value, Dual-Approach and Top-Down funds exhibited the highest correlations between AUM growth and fund returns.
While examining the correlation between AUM and performance over 3 year periods, we arrived at the results in the chart below –
Strategy-wise correlation between AUM and Performance (3Y period)
Hedge funds focused on Latin America and Africa display significantly higher correlations between AUM and performance
If a hedge fund under consideration invests primarily in the Latin American and African region, chances are that performance has a higher bearing on their AUM. A variety of volatility driven strategies thrive in this region – indeed managers in these markets are used to dealing with volatility levels close to 30%! The correlation between 3 year rolling returns and AUM for over 900 hedge funds provides these statistics–
Region-wise correlation between AUM and Performance (3Y period)
Correlation between AUM and performance increases dramatically for negative return buckets
Hedge funds which post cumulative returns under -25% for a 3Y period, witness a correlation of above 60% - a 30% increase over their peers which generate positive returns! Whilst correlation is lowest for funds which generate positive returns in the range 0 to 25%, it goes up significantly once funds cross the -25% threshold.
Cumulative return bucket-wise correlation between AUM and Performance (3Y period)
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