China-based hedge fund Evolution Asset Management’s flagship fund Multi-Strategy No1 is up almost 20% YTD, and has now returned a staggering 1,485% since inception in 2015, according to a report by Bloomberg citing data from Shenzhen PaiPaiWang Investment & Management Co.
The hedge fund, which now manages approximately RMB13bn ($1.8bn), made headlines last month after founder and Chief Executive Officer Wang Yiping pledged on social media in early April to ‘bottom-fish’ China assets amid a sell-off prompted by Trump tariffs and rising investor pessimism.
“Our conviction came from a framework that fuses data with logic,” said Wang in a statement. “From a probabilistic standpoint, adding to China assets made rational sense.”
Wang followed through publicly, announcing via Weibo on 4 April that he would allocate RMB500m to core China exposure – avoiding US assets entirely. By 8 April, positions had been fully deployed into onshore consumer names and Hong Kong-listed tech firms.
The flagship Multi-Strategy No1 fund, a hybrid of quant and discretionary strategies, ranks as the top-performing Chinese hedge fund over the past decade through 30 April. It delivered a 15% return in the first four months of 2025 alone, placing it among the top long-only performers managing over RMB10bn.
While Evolution has pivoted heavily into quant – now making up around 90% of its AUM – the firm has retained discretionary components to navigate “black swan” scenarios that models may not fully capture.
“Markets aren’t purely mathematical,” said Wang. “No model can fully replicate reality – especially when unprecedented events unfold.”
Since its inception, the fund has outperformed the CSI 300 Index in all but one year, with an average 18 percentage points of annual alpha. It’s also outperformed the Hang Seng Index, which is up roughly 16% year-to-date, but remains down 15% over the past decade.
Evolution’s success is also partly attributed to its deliberate departure from machine learning-based factor models. Since 2021, the firm has relied solely on researcher-designed, low-correlation “logic-type” factors, aimed at addressing long-tail risks and delivering stable excess returns.
This approach appears to be bearing fruit. For the week of 7 April, Evolution’s CSI 500 enhanced index fund outperformed its benchmark by 2.5 percentage points — the best result among top quants tracked by Guolian Minsheng Securities. In comparison, the average excess return for peers was just 0.25 percentage points, according to China Merchants Futures.
