DE Shaw & Co has suspended returning profits to clients despite strong performance across its flagship hedge funds last year, marking a departure from its longstanding practice of distributing gains to manage fund size, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The New York-based firm’s multi-strategy Composite fund gained an estimated 18.5% in 2025, while its macro-focused Oculus fund posted roughly 28.2%, according to sources. Both funds remain closed to new capital. Historically, DE Shaw has returned profits to prevent its funds from becoming too large to deploy effectively, a practice it maintained consistently since 2018.
The pause may reflect abundant market opportunities and client demand to remain fully invested amid a surge of top hedge fund returns. It coincides with DE Shaw’s fundraising for Cogence, a new human-driven hedge fund targeting $3–5bn, where portfolio managers will focus on fundamental analysis rather than algorithms.
Founded in 1988, DE Shaw pioneered algorithmic trading before expanding into multi-strategy, macro, and private-market strategies. Its Composite fund has delivered double-digit returns in 19 of the past 24 years, with annualised net returns of roughly 12.9%, while Oculus has never posted a negative year and has generated 14.4% net annualised returns since its 2004 inception.
