AQR Capital Management has staged a strong recovery, with assets under management climbing to $179bn and investment performance rebounding across strategies following a prolonged downturn for quantitative funds, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The Connecticut-based hedge fund manager has added around $65bn of assets this year, reportedly its fastest pace of growth on record. Five-year annualised returns across key strategies are running between 15% and 20%, comfortably ahead of industry benchmarks.
The resurgence follows a difficult period when AQR’s assets fell sharply from a peak of $226bn in 2018 during the so-called “quant winter”, when these strategies struggled and investor capital flowed towards large-cap technology stocks. Since then, the firm has overhauled elements of its investment process and expanded into other areas, including machine learning-driven models and tax-aware strategies.
The firm’s tax-aware strategies have tripled in less than a year to reach $45bn. Its Apex multi-strategy fund, launched in 2020, has doubled assets over the past year to around $6bn, while its adaptive equities strategy has grown to more than $5bn.
