Here Are The 100 Biggest Hedge Funds And Their Favorite Stocks

Once upon a time, long before central planning, before “smart beta”, and before various attorney generals busted Stevie Cohen’s massive “expert network” insider trading, pardon “information arbitrage” gig, hedge funds were spoken about in hushed tones of reverence, with special admiration reserved for their portfolio managers whose egos (and certainly bank accounts) promptly rose to the status of “financial god.”

Then, slowly at first then very fast, the facade fell off in no small part thanks to central bankers acting as Chief Risk Officers of the “market” and making any correction impossible (and thus eliminating the need to hedge as we first warned in 2011), and hedge funds quickly became the butt of all jokes, especially after 2015 when it was revealed that “alpha” simply meant jumping into a handful of “idea dinner” hedge fund hotel positions with hopes that the slowest greater fool will push up the stock price (with leverage) to mark books that much higher, and collect that elusive “20.”

Alas it did not work out, and while others were laughing, there were no smiles among LPs and fund investors, and certainly not the hedge fund employees who for yet another year were stiffed despite hopes of retiring after just a few years of “buysiding it.”

Oh well, maybe 2016 is your year. Good luck. However, as frequent readers know we have long predicted the collapse of the hedge fund industry, along with its $4 trillion or so in (unlevered) AUM for the simple reason that with central banks, there is no need to hedge (and thus the 2 and 20 model is unsustainable), while without hedge funds, there is no possible hedge one can put on to offset the systemic collapse.

Hence, in some ways, the name of my blog, ZeroHedge.

That does not mean, however, that the hedge fund industry will disappear overnight.

Here, courtesy of Bank of America, here is a list of the 100 top hedge funds in the US and their 100 favorite stock holdings – assuming the status quo continues, expect very substantial asset declines among these 100 when we rerun this analysis in 52 weeks time.