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According to Australian Fund Monitors’s 2008 Absolute Return and Hedge Fund Review, 88% of Australian hedge funds in the Fund Monitors Index outperformed the ASX 200, which returned -41.29% for 2008 (and the S&P500 -38.49%), and 25% of them achieved a positive return over the 12 months to December 2008.
AFM Hedge Fund Index returned -17.74% and the AFM Fund of Fund Index -26.28% in 2008.
Those returns were deemed positive by the AFM which further reported that, according to the Mercer survey of Long Only funds published in the Australian Financial Review, the best performing long-only fund had lost 26% over the year (the median return was -36.6%) – and 73.8% of the 200+ hedge funds tracked by the Monitors outperformed these best long-only funds.
Strategy and performance: Equity market neutral and non-equity strats did best
With the exception of Equity Market Neutral funds (6.63% for 2008), non-equity strategies such as Volatility (14.2%), Commodities (10.89%), FX (5.25%), Futures (7.93%) and Global Macro (5.21%) managers were the clear performance winners in 2008.
Against that only Equity 130/30 funds (-42.02%) and Real Estate (-52.73%) underperformed the ASX200.
And yet for all this outperformance, the perception remains that hedge funds are highly risky, highly volatile and poorly performing, comments AFM. There are obviously some amongst the hedge fund community that meet these des...................... To view our full article Click here
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