market folly

AR Magazine has revealed a list of the top 25 highest earning hedge fund managers from 2011. This is their 11th year of doing the rankings and they found that the upper echelon earned an average of $576 million and a combined total of $14.4 billion. Here's the top five:

1. Ray Dalio (Bridgewater Associates): $3.9 billion. You can view Ray Dalio on deleveragings, his newly released research paper

2. Carl Icahn (Icahn Capital Management): $2.5 billion. One of his holdings was featured as a previous stock of the week: what Carl Icahn sees in WebMD.

3. James Simons (Renaissance Technologies): $2.1 billion. We just recently posted up Jim Simons' presentation at MIT. Simons is one of the top earners on this list despite having retired.

4. Ken Griffin (Citadel): $700 million. You can view some of Citadel's latest moves here.

5. Steven Cohen (SAC Capital): $585 million. We've posted up recent portfolio activity from SAC Capital as well.


It's interesting to compare the above individual earner list to the list of the top 10 hedge funds by net gains since inception as there is no doubt some overlap.


Other Notable Earners: Chase Coleman from Tiger Global slides in at the sixth position. Recall that his fund saw big gains from private investments that IPO'd during last year. Andreas Halvorsen of Viking Global earned $300 million and Paul Tudor Jones (Tudor Investment Corp) earned $175 million.

New Additions to the List: 2011 saw plenty of new faces on AR's list including: Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management, Boaz Weinstein of Saba Capital, Jeffrey Ubben of ValueAct Capital, Paul Singer of Elliott Management, Renaissance's Robert Mercer and Peter Brown, as well as Bridgewater's Greg Jensen and Robert Prince.

Notably Absent: AR mentions that the most notable absentee from the list is John Paulson. He fell off after a weak 2011 performance wise after he was the top hedge fund earner the year prior. George Soros misses the list after he returned outside investor money and converted his hedge fund into a family office.

You can view the rest of the top 25 earners list here.