With a few days of trading left to go, 2011 is shaping up to be a mediocre year for many hedge funds. A large number of them are straddling the break-even point, give or take a gain or loss of single-digit percentage points. However, a number of hedge funds figure to finish the year with outsized gains or losses.
Available data are incomplete at this point. Although a number of funds have reported their results through mid-December, a large number haven’t. And, of course, many of the largest, most high profile funds do not generally report to the databases that tend to make the rounds among a short list of reporters. (After year-end I’ll get the performance stats of even the most secretive funds from our trusty cast of reliable sources.)
So, with these caveats out of the way, the best performer for 2011 among high profile firms is shaping up to be Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF), one of two institutional quant funds run by Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies. It was up 33.29 percent through December 16. This is its biggest gain since 2006, when the fund returned nearly 21 percent. Last year it was up 16.5 percent. The fund was created to generate gross annual returns of 400 to 600 basis points above the S&P 500 over rolling 3- to 5-year periods. So obviously it has been delivering big-time for at least the past two years.....