Poor performance and investor withdrawals have seen assets at Pelham Capital, one of London’s major equity hedge fund sector players, plummet by more than three-quarters over the past three years, according to a report by The Financial Times.
The report cites unnamed sources familiar with the matter as revealing that assets at the firm, which was founded by former Lansdowne Partners fund manager Ross Turner and is backed by Goldman Sachs’s publicly listed Petershill fund, have dropped to around $1bn from $4.5bn in October 2020.
According to Pelham investors, the firm’s flagship fund was lost 11.8% in 2021 and a further 29% last year.And while it has recovered by around 5% so dar in 2023, it is still way below its ‘high-water mark’, the level that throwers performance fee charges.
Pelham’s struggles are indicative of wider problems in the long-short equity hedge fund sector with many funds finding it difficult to generate returns during the long bull market that followed the 2008-1009 financial crisis. The likes of Adelphi Capital and Sloane Robinson have closed in recent years while other long-short funds, including Lansdowne and Egerton Capital are running smaller operations than previously.
