GLG Partners loses top spot in chart

GLG Partners has dropped from first to fourth-largest European hedge fund after its miserable year last year, as computer-driven futures funds and freewheeling global macro traders shot up the chart.

The top 50 funds compiled by the Hedge Fund Journal magazine found London’s Brevan Howard is the biggest fund in the region with $25.6bn (£18.2bn, €19.6bn) under management at the end of January, up from $20bn a year ago.

Man Group’s AHL fund, based in London, and Barclays Global Investors, part of the bank, were in second and third place, followed by GLG.

The drop for GLG, which ran close to $15bn in hedge funds, down from $23.9bn, follows a tough year for the group, which floated in 2007. It was hit by the exit of Greg Coffey, its star manager, poor performance at several of its biggest funds and the redemptions by wealthy individuals that hurt the industry as a whole.

Overall the top 50 saw their assets slide 26 per cent to $271bn, hit by a combination of losses and investor withdrawals.

Some were hit particularly hard: assets managed by London’s Marshall Wace more than halved to $6.3bn, from $14.2bn a year before, as investors keen to raise cash took advantage of its easy withdrawal terms.

Many of those rising up the table were computer-driven managed futures funds, such as Man’s AHL, Winton Capital – set up by David Harding, one of the co-founders of AHL – at number five and Rotterdam’s Transtrend, owned by Robeco, the Dutch fund manager, which rose to be the tenth largest. These trend-following funds had a banner year last year, as they rode the commodity boom and bust.

Global macro funds also did well, as the uncertain interest rate environment and wildly swinging currencies brought the style – which bets on macroeconomic themes – back into fashion.

“Liquid market strategies like macro, CTA [managed futures] and long-short equity are what people want to buy,” said Huw van Steenis, a financial services analyst at Morgan Stanley.

However, even many of the managed futures funds that did well still saw big redemptions, with Winton’s assets dropping almost $3bn from the summer to $13bn as investors raised cash.