A new investor poll shows that hedge fund investors are evenly split when it comes to the question of how satisfied they are with how the industry performed so far this year.
The survey, conducted and released by bfinance, “Managing Through Uncertainty,” asked a broad spectrum of investors from pension funds, insurers, endowments, family offices and sovereign wealth funds, how they felt about the performance of their funds during the first half of 2020. The funds in question included an equally wide range of investment products including hedge funds, private equity, real estate, and risk premia.
The survey queried a total of 368 senior investors who together manage $11 trillion.
A large majority (82%) of the respondents said they were “satisfied” with how their portfolios performed during the first half of 2020, when global stocks markets crashed an the pandemic deepened.
Within specific investment strategies the satisfaction level was not quite as positive, especially within the hedge fund sector. Namely, almost half of hedge fund investors expressed “dissatisfaction” with their returns during the first half of 2020.
The satisfaction level for hedge fund investors looked like this:
• 17% were “very dissatisfied
• 31 % were “dissatisfied”
• 35% were “satisfied”
• 8% were “very satisfied
• 8% were non-committal about their feelings
“Within the hedge fund sector, we have seen wide dispersion of manager returns both within and between strategies as a result of Covid-19 disruption,” Toby Goodworth, head of liquid markets at bfinance, said in the report.
“The sheer speed of market dislocation in March meant all but the fastest trading-oriented strategies were effectively passengers through the turbulence. A number of high-profile names produced unexpected losses and failed to demonstrate the expected diversification behaviour.”