Hedge Fund Performance Numbers: May 2010 Was Brutal ~ market folly

Friday, June 11, 2010

Hedge Fund Performance Numbers: May 2010 Was Brutal

As you've undoubtedly already heard, May was a brutal month for the markets. But at the same time, it was also brutal to many hedge funds who couldn't seem to effectively 'hedge' against the 8% decline in the indices. Compare these numbers to say those of the first quarter hedge fund performances and you'll see night and day. Below are some recently updated performance numbers from some of the most prominent hedge funds out there and some of the results will surprise you:

Andreas Halvorsen's Viking Global: -3.2% for May and now -2.62% for the year. As we've previously detailed, Visa (V) and Express Scripts (ESRX) are some of Viking's largest holdings. Visa could be partially responsible for their poor numbers as the stock was down over 20% in May, while ESRX on the other hand performed well on a relative basis as it was only down around 3% over the same timeframe. You can view Viking Global's portfolio here.

Shumway Capital Partners (Chris Shumway): -4.72% for May as we see yet another Tiger Cub hedge fund struggling. Many of their top stocks have taken a beating as of late including Teva Pharmaceuticals (TEVA), Equinix (EQIX) and Cisco Systems (CSCO), among others. You can view Shumway Capital's portfolio here.

Bill Ackman's Pershing Square: -2.2% for May but still up 5.87% for the year. We recently learned that Ackman bought shares of Citigroup (C) and is also still bullish on General Growth Properties (GGP).

Dan Loeb's Third Point LLC: -5.6% for May but still up an impressive 12.6% for the year. We recently detailed Third Point's exposure levels where we saw they were still quite long distressed debt and MBS.

John Paulson's firm Paulson & Co: His Advantage fund was -4.9% for May and his Credit Opportunities fund was down 4.2% for the month as well. For those interested in their equity investments we detailed Paulson's portfolio.

Ricky Sandler's Eminence Capital: -5.2% for May and down a whopping 9.37% year to date. In a prior Eminence investor letter, we saw that they favored large cap high quality names.

David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital: Bucking the trend, his firm was up 0.3% in the month of May, believe it or not. For those interested, we posted up Einhorn's presentation from the Ira Sohn Investment Conference.

Renaissance Technologies' RIEF: -4.46% for May but up 0.74% thus far through 2010. This of course is their fund that is open to outside investors which has not seen anywhere near the level of success as their closed and highly secretive Medallion fund. (We recently took a look at Medallion's performance numbers for those interested).

Paul Tudor Jones' BVI Global Fund (Tudor Investment Corp): -2.26% for May leaving them down 0.49% for the year. It appears that even global macro funds have had rough sailing in these choppy waters. This is not necessarily new information though as it was already publicized that global macro funds were struggling.

Louis Bacon's Moore Global: -9.15% for May and down 6.17% for the year. Obviously May was a hell of a month to the downside for the firm as it looks to have singlehandedly destroyed their year. We haven't highlighted Bacon's firm as of late but we previously posted up Moore Capital's investor letter.

Lansdowne Partners UK Equity Fund: -3.98% for May yet still up 1.07% for the year. While their short of Prudential has worked out for them, they still managed to have a rough month.

Jamie Dinan's York Capital: Down 4.8% for the month of May and up 0.67% for 2010 year-to-date. Dinan recently presented investment ideas at the Ira Sohn Conference which we summarized.

Jeffrey Altman's Owl Creek Asset Management: -2.80% for May. In the past we've covered some of Altman's thoughts at a hedge fund panel.

Odey European: Down a whopping 10.96% in the month of May alone. Ouch.

For more hedge fund performance numbers see below for the embedded report from HSBC:



You can download a .pdf copy here.

May was a brutal month for many hedgies, to put it lightly. For more from hedge fund land, be sure to check out the industry's latest exposure levels and keep up to date with the latest investments in our hedge fund portfolio tracking series.


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