Silver 8 Capital managed the highest-returning hedge fund last year, producing huge gains with a multi-style investment strategy in the financial technology sector, according to Preqin.
The Silver 8 Partners fund returned 770.74 percent, a Preqin report Thursday shows. The financial data provider said the next-best peer in the multi-strategy category was Vulpes Investment Management's Life Sciences Fund, which posted a net return of 190.03 percent in 2017.
Over a five-year period, the most consistently great multi-strategy manager was not Silver 8 or Vulpes, but Brazil's DLM Invista Asset Management. According to Preqin, DLM Invista had two of the ten most consistently top-performing funds, including DLM Hedge Conservador, the highest scoring multi-strategy fund over the past five years.
Hedge funds have been making a comeback after years of generally disappointing performance. HFR’s composite index returned 8.61 percent last year, its highest gain since 2013. For its ranking, Preqin examined each fund's annualized return and annualized volatility, as well as two measures of risk-adjusted return, the Sharpe ratio and the Sortino ratio.
The most consistent top-performers across investment strategies included the Systematic Strategies Fund, which had the highest consistency score among equity hedge funds, and Captalys FIM CP, which was the most regularly high-performing credit fund, according to the report. The Systematic Strategies Fund had annualized returns of 15.43 percent from January 2015 through December 2017, while the Captalys fund produced annualized gains of 18.83 percent for the same period.
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Among event-driven hedge funds, Hildene Capital Management's Opportunities Fund II had the most consistently good performance, while Barak Structures Trade Finance Fund ranked highest among macro funds.
Estee Capital's I-Alpha fund had the highest consistency score of all relative value funds graded by Preqin, with a three-year annualized return of 13.47 percent for the period ending in December 2017.
The most consistently top-performing CTA was HiProb Capital Management's HiProb-I fund, which produced annualized net gains of 18.34 percent between January 2015 and December 201
