Let’s face it: Asian hedge funds have been awful this year. Year-to-date they’re still in the red (-0.17 per cent according to Hedge Fund Research), making them the world’s worst performers. For start-ups then, of which there have been 53 so far, the task of capital raising, as if it wasn’t hard enough, is surely a daunting task as performance in the region lags. Capital inflows are still merely a drip as opposed to a torrent. But, as reported in Bloomberg this week, there are two Hong Kong start-ups bucking this trend. Senrigan Capital Group Ltd. and Turiya Advisors Asia have, reportedly, at least doubled their assets. Two people familiar with the situation, who declined to be named, confirmed that Senrigan, an event-driven hedge fund, had tripled its assets since its November inception to approximately USD615 million early this month. Turiya, created by ex-Goldman Sachs Asia head of arbitrage, Davide Erro, has reportedly doubled its assets to USD320 million since being launched in April. It is funds like these that have the potential to become real heavyweights and continue attracting serious institutional investment; many start-ups simply cannot compete because their asset size is unattractive to institutions. As Marlin Naidoo, Deutsche Bank’s head of hedge fund capital group for APAC in Hong Kong told Bloomberg: “The asset-raising environment for Asian hedge funds has been incredibly challenging for close to three years. Smaller funds need to significantly outperform or run very differentiated strategies in order to get noticed