Hedge Funds Pull In $24.8B in Volatile Q2, Best Inflows in a Decade
The hedge fund industry had its highest level of inflows in more than a decade in the second quarter as investors sought refuge in a volatile period driven by wild shifts in U.S. economic and trade policies.
In the quarter, hedge fund managers gathered an estimated $24.8 billion in net inflows, according to Hedge Fund Research. That was the largest quarterly inflow for the industry since the second quarter of 2014, when managers hauled in a net $30.5 billion.
Hedge funds had an estimated $37.3 billion in net inflows in the first half of this year, putting the asset class on pace to exceed the $43.8 billion recorded in 2015, the best year for inflows in the past decade, according to HFR.
A number of allocators were largely sitting on the sidelines earlier in the year as they tried to assess the direction and impact of the Trump administration’s policies, according to David Goldstein, director of fund services at STP Investment Services. Now, some of those markers are coming more into focus, he said.
“We know, more or less, what tariffs are going to look like, what fiscal policy is going to look like,” Goldstein said. “They’re allocators – they’ve got money that they have to deploy, so they can’t sit on it forever… What you’re seeing now is them taking advantage of what seems to be positive markets, and it’s time to go back into the hedge fund space.”
Read more from David Goldstein and other experts in FundFire.
