YWR: Hedge Fund Holdings Analysis
What are the hedge funds doing?
Time to analyse $2.5 trn in equity positions at 336 hedge funds with AUM > $1bn.
As usual the source data with the Top 20 Equity positions for each fund is at the bottom the post.
2024 was great.
The average return across all strategies in 2024 was +11%, with Multi-Strat and L/S Equity doing 13%.
I’ve included a link to the Aurum 2024 Hedge Fund Strategy Review at the bottom if you want to go into data on each sub-strategy. The stand out performer continues to be large multi-strats.
Top 21 Most Consensus Stocks
When we look at the most popular holdings across the funds, it’s the same big-cap tech names.
Some observations:
Nvidia is a top holding at 75 funds. Back in June this number was 62, so more funds capitulating.
Really surprised 24 funds have Carvana as a top holding.
TSMC is now a core top 10 holding. More popular than Apple.
Uber is out. Door Dash is in.
Micron & AMD are out.
Top 30 Most Consensus Funds
These are the funds with the most overlap between their Top 20 holdings and our list of the Top 21 most consensus positions.
As you can see it’s all the big funds.
Note: Adage, Quantinno and Sygnia aren’t really hedge funds.
Balyasny used to be a classic consensus fund, but has dropped off the list.
All in on Tech.
Interesting insight from the Aurum report.
It should be noted however that the multi-strategy space is dominated by a small number of very large firms, so when one looks at the mean and median figures for the last 5 years, while the figures are still strong and outperform the mean and median across the hedge fund universe, it suggests there is a clear and sustained size bias to multi-strategy returns over the long-term. pg. 8
Interesting because we see the same thing in the YWR data.
The big funds are concentrated in the Top 21 most consensus stocks. Smaller funds hold fewer of the Top 21.
When we run a scatter plot of the number of holdings from the YWR Top 21 and fund size there is a clear relationship.
Missing all the YWR Themes (Gold, China, European Banks, Energy)
The top funds aren’t positioned in any of our themes.
HF’s totally missing the gold move. Only 3 own GLD, 2 in Newmont, 1 holder of Barrick and 1 in AngloGold (The Anglogold Turnaround).
Missing China too. Only 2 holders of the main China ETF with only 1 fund each owning the two new disruptors (BYD and Xiaomi). Nobody in China’s rising semi (Cambricon).
No interest in our Asian Capital Markets theme (SGX Master Class + HKEX Our China FOMO Play)
Nobody interested in European banks… so maybe they have more to go.
Nobody interested in South Korea (Who am I ETF?)
Fund of the Month Positioning Review
Egerton stood out this month. Generally, I find the European funds to be less consensus.
Look at #1. IBKR was a key finding from our Killer Charts insights into retail trading.
Like the insurance theme (Progressive, RenRe, Arch)
Then look at #20! Berkeley. Our UK homebuilder theme which absolutely nobody is talking about.
Egerton gets a gold star.
Below is the source data on the Top 20 equity positions for over 3,000 funds. You can look up the positioning of your favorite funds.
I’ve also included Aurum’s Year End deep dive into the hedge fund sub-strategies.
Enjoy.