FAQs & Hedge Fund Sample Table
All hedge funds in one place, sortable and searchable.
What fund does into your database?
- We only include independent, U.S.-headquartered single-stock picking institutional investment firms, which means excluding:
- Bank-owned asset management firms (ie. GSAM)
- multi-manager PMs (ie. a "pod")
- single-manager seeded by a multi-manager platform (eg. Tamridge under Millennium)
- U.S. subsidiaries of non-American investment firms (such as Vontobel)
- wealth managers, financial advisors, financial planners, etc.
- global macro funds, prop trading shops, family offices
- most credit, cross-capital structure shops are NOT covered if they mostly focus on the credit (maybe do some equity stubs).
- If a fund does other asset classes (such as privates), we focus our research entirely on the public equity investing side of a fund.
- All firms covered are >$100 million RAUM.
What info about the funds does your fund database contain?
Refer to the free sample database to get a sense of depth of intel on each fund.
I do not receive a single dime from the covered firms. Content may change without prior notice. Certain funds may be unintentionally excluded, but we will update promptly if we discover more.
What resources did you use to create these primers?
100% based on public information. For legal reasons, I do not comment on firm culture, ongoing legal proceedings (unless they are facts publicized by major presses), founder personality, etc.
How often do you update the primers?
Updated quarterly in Mar/Jun/Sep/Dec.
I only need one/two primers, do you sell by pieces?
No, it's sold as a single interactive database. Otherwise an operational nightmare.
Do you plan to produce a primer for Europe? Credit funds?
Not priorities.
Fund database methodology
Hedge funds
Style
I classify funds into value, growth, event-driven, activist, healthcare (biotech/biopharma), low-net/market-neutral (LN/MN), Tiger lineage, and contrarian.
If a founder worked at a fund started by someone who worked at Tiger Management or a Tiger Cub hedge fund, I classify the fund as Tiger lineage.
“Contrarian” are funds that are open to both growth and value ideas, or run long GoodCo/short BadCo type portfolios.
Some hedge funds invest long-only. I still label them as hedge funds because the founders often came from hedge funds and tend to trade more actively than career long-only PMs.
Key people alma mater
I list the more well-known schools first for sorting purposes. You can always search your school in the search box and see which founders went to your school.
Lineage
I only list hedge funds or notable long-onlys to help you trace a fund’s style lineage (ie. if the founder worked at Soros, high chance the fund has a macro overlay). The key point: founder's prior employers heavily influence their investment style.
Long-onlys
AUM information will be updated by April of each year as funds file their annual disclose which should include updated AUM information.
I classify them as value, growth, or diversified.
Diversified means the firm offers multiple strategies - for example value, growth, income, or ESG funds. All mega long-onlys (eg. Fidelity, Wellington, Capital Group, T Rowe) fall into this category.
I used to have a category called “GARP / wide moat.” But too many people argued with me about whether a firm is really wide moat or not, and I don’t want to fight that fight anymore. If relevant, I’ve left “wide moat” or “GARP” in the fund descriptions. You can just search those keywords to filter them.
Use cases
The search works for your keyword in all fields: from fund name, all the way to the text inside the details column. Example use cases:
- If you want to find all Wharton / Penn alumni, search "Wharton" or "UPenn" This is particularly important when a fund has multiple founders, to save space on the table itself, I left the education info of all founders in the description, and a search will filter out all the funds with Wharton / Penn ties.
- Looking for funds founded by alumni of Farallon? Search "Farallon"
- Want to work for funds that do some level of activism, not just activist funds? Search for "activism" or "activist"; Same goes for biotech / biopharma / life science.
- Looking for low-net / market-neutral funds? Search "low-net" or "market-neutral" (with or without spaces) or "LN/MN"
- Looking for funds that fit your location and style filters? Use the two filters
- Looking for funds that fit your desired Regulatory Assets Under Management? Use the RAUM filter. Very important: RAUM are the gross assets under management, without subtraction of borrowings, short sales, or other forms of leverage. The figure might not be indicative of a hedge fund's true AUM.
Legends
LN/MN - Low-net/market-neutral; LO - Long-only; EM - Emerging Market
- Mid-Atlantic: Maryland (MD), Pennsylvania (PA), Virginia (VA), Delaware (DE), District of Columbia (DC)
- Midwest: Iowa (IA), Kansas (KS), Michigan (MI), Minnesota (MN), Missouri (MO), Nebraska (NE), Ohio (OH), Wisconsin (WI)
- Southeast: Alabama (AL), Arkansas (AR), Georgia (GA), Kentucky (KY), North Carolina (NC), Oklahoma (OK), South Carolina (SC), Tennessee (TN)
- West: Colorado (CO), Hawaii (HI), Nevada (NV), New Mexico (NM), Oregon (OR), Utah (UT), Washington (WA), Puerto Rico (PR)
RAUM: we use the "Discretionary" figure from Form ADV Part 1, Item 5, Part (2)(a); the as-of date of the figure is in parentheses. RAUM are the GROSS assets under management, which includes borrowings, short sales, or other forms of leverage. The figure might not be indicative of a hedge fund's true AUM.
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