hedge funds trading performance information

i've read a comment on a forum that hedge funds managers are just as lossers as the average retail trader. 5% make it.
has anyone got an info on hedge funds profitability. how many hedge funds are profitable? i know that there are a total of 9000 hedge funds in america.

forex hedge fund lose more then the adverage hedge fund

well from what i see from the alternative investment site of iasg.com about half of the funds there have success.

You won't be able to get some flat answers, because hedge funds aren't very public with performances, and are not required to publish anything especially to any central repository, and really only report summaries to industry journals like Bloomberg Markets. I wouldn't be surprised if some 90%~ish figure of negative performing (either -0% growth or lower than S&P growth) HFs turned out to be true, but also remember that many HFs usually are not one man shows, but teams of analysts working away.

Here is an estimate that HFs return on average 11.4% based on 8400 HFs, with such a small margin between the average and 0%, there's sure as hell many negative HFs...

Here you can see the top 20 large (1B+ in assets) performing HFs of 2011. The information is summed up in the first pic below.

Here is a Barclays hedge fund database snapshot. There is pic below.

You can see that the top 20 large (1B+ assets) HFs did between 12.7 - 45% for 2011, when the S&P did 5.5%. This is a pretty good number, but consider that there are literally thousands of HFs and these figures are for the top 20 (large). Also, in the database snapshot you can see that of the 6120 funds in the database, 67.13% of them had negative earnings for May.

Combine these two snippets of info and you can get a rough idea of the HF performances. On a funny note, you can see that the largest amount of funds is in the Caribbean!...Surely nothing fishy is going on.

thanks for the info especially that one from barclays. even we have data only for may and combing that with the data from iasg i quess there are 50% with a positive year , maybe less. and those guys were supposed to be proffesionals.

Yeah it's incredibly embarrassing, for them, some of the smartest brains working away analyzing stocks, commodities, bonds, entire economies, some of the best IT equipment...and about/over half of them are bogus...maybe I'm being too mean, perhaps there's some odd reason why more of them aren't able to produce greater returns and at the least beat the S&P growth.

That's not embarrassing. It tells you how difficult the market is.

No, it's pretty embarrassing. Hedge funds underperformed savings accounts, indices and even just holding cash.

They were actively worse with your money than doing nothing.

Median ror -1.14% , 0.76% lol...