Hedge funds, led by tech-centric firms including Whale Rock Capital Management and Light Street Capital Management, are on track for a year of bumper returns having recorded big gains in the first half of 2024, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Light Street put on 54.6% in the first half, with a healthy portion of gains from its short book, while Alex Sacerdote’s Whale Rock gained 31.7%.
The report cites unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter as highlighting that large multi-manager funds such as Citadel, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors and Point72 Asset Management have also posted gains of up to 13.7%, with a PivotalPath index tracking mutli-strategy funds up almost 6% during the first half of the year, the second-best for the period in 15 years.
Both Light Street and Whale Rock benefited from substantial investments in top-performing S&P 500 companies, including Nvidia Corp, Amazon.com Inc, and Meta Platforms Inc, according to their first-quarter regulatory filings. Despite these strong returns though, neither fund has yet fully recovered from the losses they incurred in 2021 and 2022.
The report cites Caron Bastianpillai, who allocates money to hedge funds at Switzerland-based NS Partners, as saying that: “Overall, 2024 looks like it could be a good vintage for hedge funds overall after a strong start to the year across almost all hedge fund strategies, except for risk arbitrage and macro relative value.”
