• 2024 was a good year for many of the industry's biggest quant names.
• Players like Renaissance Technologies and Marshall Wace returned more than 20%.
• Cliff Asness's AQR also had a big year, with its multistrategy Apex fund returning more than 15%.

Much like their peers in the multistrategy world, quant hedge funds had a strong 2024.

Algorithm-driven trading firms mostly delivered double-digit returns across different quant strategy types, including "quantamental" funds that blend systematic and human-run qualities into one and trend-following offerings. However, most of these funds failed to match the S&P 500's 23% gain.

In 2024, the biggest and oldest names in computer-run hedge funds led the way, such as Renaissance Technologies, the firm founded by the late billionaire Jim Simons.

The firm's two main funds available to investors — Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund and Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha — were up 22.7% and 15.6%, a person close to the manager told Business Insider. Of course, the manager's legendary Medallion fund, which now runs around $12 billion of internal capital, performed even better with a 30% return, Simons' biographer and Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman said in a Linkedin post.

In the UK, longtime strategies for $70.9 billion Marshall Wace and $13.1 billion Winton Group had good years. Marshall Wace's TOPS fund, an alpha-capture pioneer that systematically evaluates ideas and research from humans to create its portfolio, made 22.7%, according to a person close to the London-based firm. The all-quant multistrategy Winton Fund was up 10.3% last year, a person familiar with the firm told BI.

French quant firm Capital Fund Management, which is expanding its US presence, made 14.2% in its Stratus fund, which manages roughly $11.8 billion. The firm overall runs $16.7 billion across its half-dozen strategies, all of which were up double-digits in 2024, a person close to the firm said.

Cliff Asness's AQR meanwhile made 17.9% in its $2.5 billion trend-following Helix fund, a firm spokesperson told BI. The manager's $2.3 billion multistrategy fund, Apex, returned 15.1% on the year.

Graham Management was also up, returning 11.9% in its quantamental fund known as Proprietary Matrix while its trend-following option returned 6.7%, according to a person close to the Connecticut-based manager with $20 billion in assets.

But these managers have no time to rest. Artificial intelligence advancements have firms racing to build out systems and teams to better their processes. A new fund from OpenAI alum Leopold Aschenbrenner has the backing of Stripe's founders and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and is "focused on" a type of AI that would match human intelligence.

"The industry is experiencing an information arms race with respect to how much information can be gathered and how quickly it can be processed," a new release from Don Steinbrugge, an industry consultant who runs Agecroft Partners, reads.

"Information advantages are often short-lived, and many managers will continue investing in a host of new technologies."

More firms' performance figures will be added as they are learned.

• Dmitry Balyasny and Steve Schurr, a senior portfolio manager, discussed the firm's equities rebuild.
• Balyasny has been leading the unit since Jeff Runnfeldt's departure in October 2023.
• The manager wants its equities teams to focus on deep research, not short-term trading.

Throughout its 23-year history, Dmitry Balyasny's firm has been known, first and foremost, as a stock picker.

While the $20 billion multistrategy firm has added strategies like macro, commodities, and quant over the years and expanded its head count to 2,000 people, the Chicago-based manager still leads with its equities expertise.

So when the firm's equities teams were dragging the manager's performance down to the bottom of the league tables in 2023, Balyasny decided to undergo a "course correction" in its largest business unit, the founder told Business Insider in an interview at the firm's office in London's posh Mayfair neighborhood.

"People were trading too much and not investing enough," Balyasny said.

The "top-down philosophical" refocus, he said, has been on ideas, research, and longer timelines. Instead of trying to "catch every wiggle" or make money on every market twitch, portfolio managers are being pushed to find multimonth or even multiquarter investment ideas, he said. The result has been lower position turnover and less trading in PMs' books.

And performance rebounded in 2024: After a big November that had the manager up 11.6% through the first 11 months, the manager is set to land squarely in the middle of its peers for the year.

While the firm's hiring — for the equities unit as well as other strategies — got most of the headlines for the manager this year, Balyasny said it was the improvement of existing stock-picking teams that drove the returns.

DNA change

Balyasny's equities struggles coincided with multistrategy firms' growth and hedge funds' increased use of alternative data, such as credit-card transactions and email receipts, which can provide a sneak peek of a company's performance before it reports earnings.

This data, which provided an invaluable edge a decade ago but is now table stakes at firms like Balyasny, pushed investors to focus "excessively on triangulating and calling quarters," said Steve Schurr, a senior portfolio manager who was promoted to the equities leadership team in mid-2023, when the "course correction" began.

"It's become a strategy of diminished expected returns" as more firms use this type of data, he told BI.

Schurr, who started his career in investing working for the legendary short-seller Jim Chanos, performed well during the equities division's run of underperformance. Balyasny identified his focus on primary research as a winner and pushed him to spread it across the firm.

"We had to change the DNA of how we conducted research here," Schurr said.

The firm built out an internal research database called Telescope, which has an AI overlay to summarize things like podcasts, expert network calls, and sell-side research. A new 15-person internal research team with data scientists and former journalists has done 120 projects for PMs this year.

Schurr said he believed that "durable edge" for all multistrategy firms investing in equities would come through primary research, not alternative data.

"I think we are back to the anarchy of having to be good investors," he said of the multistrategy sector, adding that "80% of a portfolio manager's opportunity is going to be from equity selection."

Player-coaches

As the industry has matured, the titans of the field have gone from brash traders to business-building executives. The leaders at Citadel, Millennium, Jain Global, Brevan Howard, and more do not run a book.

Steve Cohen, the billionaire founder of Point72 and owner of the New York Mets, stopped trading this summer — and it felt like the official end of an era.

But Balyasny has begun trading a book again for his firm after giving it up for a time. Other leaders on the equities team — including Schurr and Peter Goodwin, who's launching an internal stock-picking unit called Longaeva Partners and plans to hire PMs to work underneath him — are also managing portfolios of their own.

Balyasny, who has tapped people to run his quant, commodities, and macro units, isn't planning to hire someone to oversee equities. Jeff Runnfeldt, now the chief investment officer of Fortress' multimanager platform, oversaw the equities unit, but Balyasny stepped into the role on an interim basis after Runnfeldt and the firm parted ways in October 2023.

For now, the interim tag has been removed. Balyasny said he believes that trading alongside his employees helps him connect with potential recruits as he's in the trenches with them.

Balyasny has had its ups and downs — specifically in 2018 when the manager laid off 20% of its staff and saw investors redeem $4 billion. The circumstances this time around are much different, he said, thanks to the diversification of the firm's assets and LP base.

In 2018, 90% of the risk was in equities; now it's 40% to 50%. The firm's investors were only 20% institutional in 2018; now that figure is 70%, giving the firm long-term capital partners.

That's important to have as the firm has remade its biggest unit. There are 65 to 70 portfolio managers in the firm's three equities groups — Balyasny, Corbets, and Longaeva — and plans to expand, specifically in Goodwin's unit.

Schurr said the pitch to recruits was simple: "You're not just going to be a cog in the machine."

For years the best portfolio managers have had to choose between having all the resources and building a business — but Balyasny says you can have it all. He compares running an equities team to being a young company pitching a venture firm.

Year-end meetings between PMs and business heads lay out why someone should get certain resources and capital based on their plans and expectations for the year ahead.

While top investors can also launch their own funds, Balyasny argued that this path "is not really worthwhile" given where the capital in the industry is flowing — and which funds have been seeding new launches. "Why not be in-house and get all the resources?" he said.

Schurr has three questions for each potential PM: What's your unique strategy? How do you build a team and a research process to support it? And how would you construct a portfolio to optimize it?

"Among the multistrats, I think we have a really compelling offering," Schurr said, adding: "I'll let others try to call quarters. I want Balyasny to be the house of the best investors."

'You have to grow'

Growth is, in many ways, a requirement of a multistrategy firm instead of a goal. Assets, head count, strategies, office locations — all should be ticking up if things are going as planned.

Balyasny said the firm is always looking for people "to deepen the bench" on both the investing side and the business side of the equation, such as Kevin Byrne, who was brought over from Millennium this year to be the firm's chief operating officer. He pointed out that Byrne joined Millennium when that firm was roughly the same size — $20 billion, give or take — as Balyasny is now.

When asked if tripling the firm's assets was the goal — which would put the manager close to where Millennium currently sits — Balyasny said he didn't have a specific AUM goal in mind. Still, as long as the liquidity in the markets they trade in grows, their strategies should be able to as well, he said.

The firm wants to be a leading industry player, Balyasny said. "You can't be substantially smaller than others," he added.

Size certainly matters in the recruiting battleground as guaranteed payouts grow. Balyasny said the money the firm spent on new hires this year is in line with what the manager has historically invested in talent.

He said the manager had traditionally spent 1% to 1.5% of its AUM on recruiting annually, which would put this year's figure at $200 million to $300 million. A significant portion of recruiting costs are tied to performance over time, he said.

This year, more of that recruiting spend has gone toward equities hires, including big names like Goodwin, who have commanded larger packages.

The firm knows that to keep up, "you have to grow over time," he said. "But it doesn't have to be a straight line."

• The $19 billion manager Rokos Capital is an outlier in the increasingly institutional hedge fund industry.
• Its billionaire namesake, who was a cofounder of Brevan Howard, runs the majority of the portfolio.
• While multistrategy funds are attractive for their diversification, Rokos is appealing for its big bets.

Investors in the billionaire Chris Rokos' eponymous hedge fund had reason to celebrate the reelection of Donald Trump.

The firm made nearly $1 billion in profits the day following Trump's victory, Bloomberg first reported, pushing its year-to-date gains to more than 28% through mid-November.

The macro manager, now running $19 billion, made money across asset classes following the election, when US stocks ripped upward, the dollar strengthened, and Treasury yields jumped — as did many funds that put on the "Trump trade" before the election.

But very few firms the size of Rokos Capital Management have so much of their portfolio concentrated with a single risk-taker. While Rokos has hired quasi-portfolio managers who can put on trades — known in the firm's parlance as "investment officers" — the firm's founder still runs the majority of the portfolio, several people close to the firm said.

As the hedge fund industry's titans have shifted away from macro philosophers to business-building executives, Rokos is a throwback to a time when names like Stanley Druckenmiller and George Soros were on the top of every allocator's wish list.

And the anachronistic London-based manager has ridden its strong performance and, ironically, the movement away from its style of investing to its record size. The biggest investors in the world — sovereign wealth funds, pensions, endowments, and more — now need diversification in their portfolios from the sprawling multistrategy managers that often move as a group and put on similar trades.

Against this backdrop, Rokos stands out for its lack of correlation with the industry's biggest names.

"Pensions need the volatility," one Rokos investor at a US pension told Business Insider. Limited partners in Rokos include Canada's main pension fund and Blackstone, people familiar with the firm said.

And after raising another $2 billion in assets earlier this year, Rokos is not slowing down, industry insiders said. The firm declined to comment.

'Deprived' of his abilities

The 54-year-old Oxford-by-way-of-Eton grad cut his teeth at UBS, Goldman Sachs, and, finally, Credit Suisse, where he spent a little over three years trading alongside Alan Howard.

In 2002, Howard, Rokos, and three other Credit Suisse traders left the now-defunct Swiss bank to launch Brevan Howard (the "R" in Brevan is for Rokos). A decade later, the star trader left the manager hoping to start his own investment firm.

A five-year noncompete agreement stopped any immediate plans, though, despite Rokos' lawyers arguing that the sit-out period would leave the public "deprived" of his "skills and hard work."

Eventually, Rokos and Howard settled their dispute, and Howard even backed Rokos' new manager, reports at the time said. Rokos Capital Management launched in the fall of 2015, quickly growing to $3.5 billion before closing to new money.

In a preview of things to come, Rokos profited from Trump's first election in 2016 — the manager returned close to 20% in its first full year of trading.

Nearing its 10th anniversary, Rokos today resembles the original Brevan more so than the current iteration of Howard's manager. Brevan, which has seen its assets rise and fall thanks to uneven performance over the past decade, is structurally closer to multistrategy managers like Citadel and Millennium as it diversifies assets across risk-takers around the world.

When Brevan launched, Howard was the biggest risk-taker; Now, he no longer trades for the manager, BI reported earlier this year.

Headquartered on the posh London strip known for its bespoke tailoring, Roko's firm has a "Savile Row style" of customization for its founder. The team and research functions are molded to his way of investing, a former employee told BI, even down to the font and color coding of reports.

The goal of the firm's dozens of investment officers, analysts, and researchers — regulatory filings show that 60 people perform "investment advisory functions" across the firm's London and New York offices — is to be his "eyes and ears," this person said, adding: "When he had a question, there was a number we could find to answer it."

Rokos' superpower is his ability to monitor positions like "a human quant." One person who worked with him said he knows the positions put on by his investment officers better than they do, despite managing a much larger book.

This person also said he could stay steady in areas he's confident in, even if markets move against him in the short term.

"He's willing to wait through cycles if he believes the risk is worth it," another person who worked for him said.

A demanding place

It wasn't the plan for Rokos to be the only one putting on trades when the firm launched, people familiar with his thinking at the time said, though that was the reality for a number of years.

Several people at the firm at its start said the issue was that he couldn't find people who thought and traded exactly like him. These people said it's a physically demanding place that requires working long hours alongside a founder who constantly questions everything.

"He has a relentless pursuit of the truth," one person said.

As a result, the firm has cycled through several executives and management structures over the years. Mark Edwards, a former Goldman Sachs managing director who joined Rokos at its launch, stepped down from his CEO perch earlier this year, triggering a slew of changes.

Matthew Sebag-Montefiore, a onetime partner at the consultant Oliver Wyman, is now the CEO, while Pria Bakhshi was promoted to the global head of strategic solutions. Quita Ramirez joined last December as the global head of business development, investor relations, and communications from Schonfeld. Dmitry Green and Lauren Fairbairn, both partners, left this year.

Still, Rokos has worked to delegate some of the risk-taking to others. One investor estimated he takes 60% to 70% of the firm's risk, and that may continue to go down.

Several people close to the firm said he's hoping to add more investment officers, specifically in equities. The exact number of investment officers the firm employs is unclear, though a LinkedIn review shows 17 with the title, many of whom are also partners.

Volatility wanted

While it's counterintuitive, the manager's biggest selling point might be the roller-coaster nature of its returns. A 44% surge in 2020 was followed by a 26% drop in 2021. In 2022, when the S&P 500 dropped more than 18%, the manager had its best year on record, with a 51% gain.

With worries the industry might be hitting peak multistrategy, managers with a higher risk-return profile should be more common, the billionaire AQR founder Cliff Asness wrote earlier this year.

Alternatives "are generally more effective in higher-vol versions," he wrote but "mostly (not entirely) missing from the market today and should take on a bigger role."

As Brevan has transformed into a more diversified platform, and the likes of Louis Bacon, Michael Platt, and David Tepper have returned outside capital, allocators and industry insiders said it's hard to find a peer of Rokos'.

Jeffrey Talpins' Element Capital mostly runs internal money after returning funds at the start of the year, and Said Haidar overhauled his manager after a 43% loss in 2023. Paul Tudor Jones has expanded into quant strategies and seeded external funds, though he's still known for big directional bets.

Rokos, a press-shy billionaire whose media mentions are mostly about construction projects at his multimillion-dollar properties, including a 100-bedroom manor that dates to the days of Henry VIII, is in a league of his own, one investor said.

The limit to the firm's growth, this person said, is going to be internal restraints, not external interest.

"He could raise another $2 billion with a snap of his fingers," this person said.