Hedge Fund Investors Definition

Below please find a definition of “Hedge Fund Investors”

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Sometimes I get to speak with other third party marketers and hedge fund marketing professionals about their experiences in working with hedge fund investors. What I find is that overall most marketers experiences are very similar while each investor is different just as each due diligence process within different firms vary. Hedge fund investors typically fall into one of these four categories:

The “Follow Me” Hedge Fund Investor

Most of these investors make up your pool of family, friends, co-workers, and people you interact with regularly. Usually, these people don’t understand how to perform the necessary due diligence in making a decision to invest. This group also tends to make assumptions. For example, if a manager holds a degree from Harvard or has experience from a top financial firm, this aspect alone would persuade investors to follow suit ignoring the probability of fraud. In addition, they heavily rely on personal acquaintance and recommendations from either you or someone you may know. If you ask for a check, and they trust you, this group will most likely give one to you.

The “Send Me a Prospectus” Hedge Fund Investor

This group is a bit more sophisticated by conducting a minimum amount of due diligence into the manager’s performance. Once they are satisfied with the performance on paper, they will meet with and usually shower the manager with questions regarding every aspect of the fund, including returns, performance, strategies, and risks. What is written and spoken by the manager is taken into faith and the information is not properly verified by the investor.

The “Investigating” Hedge Fund Investor

This type of investor is sometimes considered a nuisance by busy professionals who might caught off-guard by their questions. Not only will the investor keep the manager’s number on speed dial, the investor will perform the due diligence above and beyond the type mentioned above and also go far as to understanding the entire operation of the fund as if he or she were the manager. This type would also interview members of the manager’s staff. The investor would also look into the balance sheet, cash controls, reporting, and other functions, not directly related to performance. Nuisance?

The “Independent” Hedge Fund Investor

The due diligence collected by this investor is thoroughly reviewed independently. Investors in this category know that independent opinions are extremely important. They will contact the auditor, custodian and administrator in addition to the SEC and/or state securities agency. They won’t sign on the dotted line until they are satisfied independently verifying everything that matters, including, assets under management, returns, and even a year end audit. They fully understand the risks that are involved.

Nobody likes to be put in a box, but it is important to realize that the types of investors can vary widely so the array of marketing materials you have should include brief one pagers to very detailed institutional-quality PowerPoint presentations and third party analysis for those most scrutinizing parties. My experience has been that marketing material first built to the highest standard and then summarized into smaller “dumbed down” pieces later can be very effective and versatile.

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Hedge Fund Transparency

In recent years since the financial crisis and scandals like the Bernard Madoff fraud, transparency has become even more important to investors.  Now more than ever, investors are looking for hedge funds of an institutional quality.   In the following video, I discuss the importance of institutionalization and transparency as well as how it relates to running a hedge fund.  This video will be very valuable to hedge fund managers looking to improve their operations.


Video Transcript/SummaryThe strategies and tips provided within this video module include:

  1. Transparency is basically operating and investing within your portfolio so that investors have near 100% understanding of what you are doing and how your hedge fund operates.
  2. Reporting to investors should be done quickly and consistently at least once a quarter.
  3. Establish a very thorough process for hiring.
  4. Be as transparent to investors as possible in your investment process.
  5. Be pro-active in your transparency efforts.

Transcript for Hedge Fund Transparency

Hello, this is Richard Wilson and today we’re going to talk about institutionalization and specifically the importance of transparency, what that means and how to really get some transparent things in place for your hedge fund business. So first of, transparency is basically operating and investing within your hedge fund portfolio in a way that investors have almost 100% see-through of your decision-making processes, your research, your risk management and your investment process and even your team and what they’re doing every day.

So let’s give some examples here and they could really mean. First is risk reporting. Lots of hedge funds have T plus 2 or you know a day or two delayed at risk reporting, somehow same day position risk reporting. Someone may do monthly or quarterly detailed risk reports. It’s important that they’re done consistently, usually the more often the better. Usually you can enable them with technology so that they’re done faster and with less individual manual levels of effort. And on a consistent basis it’s good to send this to your investors proactively, maybe once a month, once a quarter at least, it’s being sent to them so they know that you know what your risk positions are at all times.

And one thing that goes along with that is that if you get in the habit of acting in the right ways in terms of operating in the right ways, operating about looking at intraday risk positions then that’s something you can produce for an investor. And the largest of investors are the ones that are going to do the most checks on how your businesses ran. And one other test might be, if they ask for a risk report, how many days does it take for you to produce that? Does it take a month? Do you say well maybe until the quarter? You know once you response maybe you can provide it back to them in an hour or the same day or the next morning, that’s a world difference from it taking two weeks for a fund that has never had to do that before or that doesn’t have the technology in place to do produce that same report.

So risk reporting is a good example of being transparent. Other transparency could be the very thorough process through which you hire somebody. Everybody knows that a pedigree is one of the most important things for attracting new investors but how many hedge funds when they go and do a due diligence call and talk about not only their investment process but their pedigree investment process. How do they hire very talented experienced professionals? How do they attract more talent per dollar spent than any other competitors? Is it through equity sharing? Is it through vested benefits? Is it through vested profit sharing? Is it through building a strategic board and then slowing hiring on some of those professionals?

I think showing how your business as a hedge fund is advanced enough that you thought through these things and you have a documented, somewhat rigid process for making sure that you had grade A talent for your team is something that the biggest institutional investors will really appreciate because a larger — the more money they have to invest, the larger their organization potentially is and they might have similar systems in place or maybe they realize they should have such systems in place and they’ll respect you for having it already in place.

So I think that that’s another good example, something transparent that you can share. Another thing that ran across most often with emerging hedge fund managers is that they believe that they need to be so secretive. They cannot even share their investment process. And there was a study that came out in 2007 that showed that 86% of institutional investors will not invest in something unless they understand the investment and the investment process behind it. And so I think it is very important that you’re as transparent as possible of your investment process. Maybe your investment process has 4 steps and maybe each of those 4 steps has 5 parts. So maybe what you do is you explain the 4 steps and you provide a summary of those 5 parts.

If you provide some detail but not so much as somebody could copy every little step of your investment process or if your magic sauce is really your research in the inputs under your research system, maybe you share all 20 points of that research, of that investment process and that way you’re more transparent to your competitors, your investors understand exactly all of the different checks you’re doing and processes your following consistently and that can come up stronger than somebody who has 2 percentage a year performance better than yours or even a longer track record but they’re not as transparent.

So that’s another example. Being very transparent on your investment process is another great practical, you know something that you can take away today and start using it as an example of how to be more transparent and how you operate. So in every case within your business, if you look at the 18 or the 12 business functions or strong points about your firm and look at each one and how transparent you are, how transparent your competitors are and how far you could push that line of transparency, I think you’d be rewarded for being proactively very transparent. I agree, there may be an area or two where you want to be less than 100% transparent, or possibly one or two of your reports may only go to investors who have a certain criteria of being the very highly interested or qualified investor.

But in most cases it just kind of benefit you to be more transparent than most or all of your competitors if possible within every area of your business. On some level now, after the Madoff scam there is actually a sense of distrust. At some level nobody trusts anybody. There’s always friends and business that helps smooth things along and get things done quicker, but then when it moves up the chain of command there’s almost always more regimented controls now to have everything checked, due diligence done and things compared and revisited more frequently.

So it’s important to be transparent. I don’t see that trend reversing and you actually make everything smoother for yourself if you’re just transparent upfront. They’ll be less questions and less scrambling to come up with answers and reports down the road when those questions do come up. So thank you for your time today and I hope you enjoyed this video. We’ll see you next time.

Transparency has perhaps never been as appreciated by investors as it is today.  I believe that you will be rewarded for your efforts at increasing transparency and communication with investors.  

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Hedge Fund Liquidity

There is a near-constant debate that takes place between hedge fund managers and investors over liquidity and lock-up periods.  In this video, I explain hedge fund liquidity and lock-up periods and what these things mean to hedge funds and hedge fund investors.

Video Transcript/SummaryThe strategies and tips provided within this video module include:

  1. Liquidity is often something taken into consideration by investors that invest in hedge funds.
  2. With some hedge funds, you have monthly liquidity and you put in a redemption request that will be filled by the end of the month.  
  3. Other hedge funds have long lock-up periods because they invest in assets with longer investment horizons.
  4. The average lock-up period for a hedge fund is 18 months.  
  5. A lock-up period could be very strict or the fund might simply charge a fee for withdrawing your money earlier than the agreed-upon time.  
  6. Institutional investors may be better suited for these longer-term investments.

Transcript for Hedge Fund Liquidity
Coming soon.

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Hedge Fund Business Investment

An important part of running any successful company is reinvesting in the business, a hedge fund should be no different.  In the following video, I provide you with ten signs that a hedge fund is investing in their own business.

Video Transcript/SummaryThe strategies and tips provided within this video module include:

  1. Make sure the hedge fund manager has a real office.
  2. They use service providers.
  3. They invest in an experienced team.
  4. The have a very strong advisory board.
  5. They have training for their hedge fund employees, after they join.
  6. The systems that they have in place.  
  7. They have processes in their hedge fund business documented.
  8. The level of risk management for the hedge fund business is high.
  9. The research that they use to make decisions.
  10. The quality of their marketing materials.  

I recently spoke at the GAIM conference in Monaco and many hedge funds were looking for ways to show investors that they consistently invest in their hedge fund business.  These ten signs will give you a better idea of whether the hedge fund manager is, in fact, re-investing in their hedge fund business.

Transcript of Hedge Fund Business Investment

Hello, this is Richard Wilson and welcome to this short video on 11 signs that a hedge fund manager is reinvesting in their own business. I’m coming to you from Nice, France today where I was in town recording some training videos for the hedge ground and I just spoke in Monaco, next door, at the game. I had a conference with about 800 people there. And it was really interesting a while there. It was obvious that both hedge fund managers and family offices attending were very interested in knowing more about how to reinvest in their business the right way and how to make it obvious to investors or the hedge fund managers taking their business seriously and really reinvesting in their own business and taking it as something that, you know it was long-term venture and not something they’ll set up and try to make a million dollars in one year.

So the first thing they should look for is to make sure the hedge fund manager has a real office and that they’re not just running the fund out of their house or their garage. You know if somebody is taking their seriously they may have rented an office space or have an office for their employees as their fund grows. The second thing is they have service providers. Many times people try to do their own fund administration when they’re starting up but they don’t have a time broker to start with. If they’ve taken their hedge fund seriously and spoken with people they know, they have to have certain service providers in place. They should have an auditor, they should have an accounting firm, they should have a current brokerage firm, they should have a fund administration firm, they should have an attorney they go to, a compliance legal expert. If they don’t have those things in place, they haven’t done the very basics.

The next thing is team. This is the most important thing. If they have really taken their hedge fund seriously, they’re invested in their team. They have people with great experience, 7-10 plus years experience on their team and at the very least a very strong advisory board. Advisory boards just take a lot of work and creativity. If somebody doesn’t have a strong advisory board in place then it’s really hard to believe their taking their hedge fund business very seriously unless they’ve just started out and they have great bench experience on their team. That’s the only excuse they could find for not having a great advisory board in place.

The next sign is someone who has invested in their hedge fund is that they have training for the employees after they joined. In the hedge fund industry everybody values experience like gold until you come in the door and then almost nobody trains their current team. That is non-sub $1B hedge funds. Lots of large hedge funds do train their team consistently and very thoroughly. But most hedge fund managers under a billion dollars have no training systems in place for anyone on their team, which is I think really ironic given how valued a hedge fund experience is in our industry.

The next sign is someone who has invested in their hedge fund is the systems they have in place, the technology, the trading systems, the reporting systems, how everything flows through the business. You can really tell if it’s really segmented and not working well but how quickly people respond to requests for certain type of data and that you can just really tell someone has reinvested in how they run their business based on their technology and the reporting and trading the systems they have in place.

Next for your tips include having processes. All of the procedures and processes in your business should be documented so that when a new employee comes into the hedge fund, they just look at what processes are related to their responsibilities, they know how things are supposed to be done, everything in the hedge business should be done systematically, almost nothing is done only time. There should be a process for doing everything. In this way if you needed to replace someone on the team or God forbid, the principal of the hedge fund dies, the hedge fund can still move on and follow the same investment process, the same risk management techniques and the same capital raising strategies.

The last few tips here, the level of risk management in the firm, if somebody takes a lot of research, hard work and reinvestment in the business, you know had a very elementary risk management techniques just in how they chose securities, there’s really not enough to cut it anymore. They need to manage operational risk as well as portfolio risk in many different types of ways. So if the manager is not, then that’s a big sign they haven’t reinvested in their own business enough.

The last two tips. They research they use to make their investments, the experience on their team, how do they make their decisions, what’s the quality of information coming into those decisions, and lastly finally is the level of quality of their marketing materials. If their marketing materials looks like a college project or a high school then that says one thing, if their marketing materials look like something from Wall Street, coming out of Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs, it says something completely different.

So just to review real quick, the top 10 things that show the hedge manager is reinvested in themselves included their office space, their service providers, their team, their training for their team, their systems, their advisers or board of advisers, their processes and procedures, their risk management, their research and their marketing materials.

This is Richard Wilson. Thanks for joining me. I’m here in Nice, France and we’ll see you next time.

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Warning Signs for Hedge Fund Investors

Investing in hedge funds is very different from investing in traditional investments like stocks or mutual funds.  In the following video, I point out five warning signs that hedge fund investors should look out for while investing in hedge funds.  This should not be considered financial advice, rather it is a few red flags that hedge fund investors should watch out for.

Video Transcript/SummaryThe strategies and tips provided within this video module include:

  1. Avoid one-man hedge fund shops.  If something happens to that one person, the hedge fund will surely suffer.
  2. The hedge fund does not have an administration firm.
  3. No ability or track record of raising capital.
  4. No marketing materials.  A hedge fund is wasting your time if they haven’t taken time to compose their thoughts and strategy in easy-to-understand marketing materials that give you all the necessary information to make a well-informed decision on whether to invest in their fund.
  5. There is no deep experience on the team.  Don’t settle for an inexperienced team.  
Transcript for Warning Signs for Hedge Fund Investors

Hello, this is Richard Wilson. I’m coming to you from Nice, France today. I’m here recording some training videos for the hedge fund group. And today I want to talk to you about how I’ve been working with a single-family office from the United States and helping them develop criteria for identifying potential hedge fund managers to invest in.

So what I’d like to do is provide you with 5 kind of warning signs, very obvious things if you’ve been invested in hedge funds for a long time, but if you’re a family office or a wealth management firm or other type of investor, just to kind of give you a start in investing in hedge funds. There are some very basic things to look at while analyzing hedge fund managers. This is not financial advice but it is kind of just some basics on hedge fund education and now hedge fund businesses are formed.

The first thing is to avoid one-man hedge fund shops. That one person gets sick, God forbid if they died, their business is not going to be sustainable. You know multiple minds acting collectively with some organization is going to be more powerful than one person, even a team of just 2 or 3 people is better in my experience to invest in than just a one-person hedge fund.

The second thing is not having an administration firm. Since the Madoff scandal mini board of advisers of hedge funds all over the world have been forcing their hedge fund to have a third-party fund administration firm in place. As for many reasons it verifies the assets, it has some checks and balances while running the hedge fund and if you need someone who is not using the fund administration firm, you have to want to know why and wonder how serious they are about working with other types of investors like yourself.

The third thing is have no ability or track record of raising capital. If someone is at $5M or $10M or $30M on capital they may be worth looking at, maybe they’re just getting started, maybe they have an unrecognized talent on their team and a deep bench of experience on their team and you can be one of those first people to discover them. You can have huge amount of capacity in this voyage maybe very well. But many times the funds which have a lot of talent but are bad at raising capital may not survive long enough to really have a sustainable business. They don’t want to invest in a hedge fund and do all these due diligence and grow a great relationship with a hedge fund manager just to have them go out of business a year later.

So even if the hedge fund doesn’t have a lot of capital they should at least have some potential ways of raising capital and somebody on their team dedicated to raising capital, not the portfolio manager doing it 5 hours a week and not the idea that they’re going to build a track record for 5 years and then outsource it to a third-party marketer. It just doesn’t happen very often. Lots of times those hedge funds never make it.

The fourth thing is not having any marketing materials. The hedge fund manager meets with you and he hasn’t put all of his thoughts, his investment processes, risk management strategies, his past investment details, his term sheet. A service provider is all within a well-organized document and he really hasn’t invested in his business enough then he’s wasting your time. You should tell him to go back and come back to you when he has organized his thoughts within a one-pager and a PowerPoint pitch book. It’s very, very basic. So if somebody doesn’t have that they’re really not worth meeting with in most cases unless you’re doing somebody a favor just to give them some early kind of hedge fund startup advice.

And the final tip here on avoiding certain types of hedge fund managers is just the one who has no deep experience on the team. There are some teams out there that are focused on very niche areas like trading, orange juice contracts, or trading freight shipping contracts or on running a global map or a strategy focused only a few different parts of the world or focused on frontier markets specifically, maybe they specialize in 4 different countries specifically. So there’s very, very specialized people out there. There’s people that have 20 years or 30 years experience in one or two small niche areas. So don’t settle for a team that didn’t have a really experience on an area that’s directly connected to their scope of investments.

And again, it might seem overly obvious but many times hedge fund managers might have some fancy sounding model or their back testing might be amazing or they have this 3-year track record that’s amazing. But really I wouldn’t care what their 3 or 5-year track record is if they don’t have a unique position in the marketplace and don’t have a deep experience that leads them to have any competitive edge in the marketplace.

So I hope these 5 tips helped. I’ll just run through them again; avoid hedge fund managers, have a one-man shop that don’t have an administration firm, they don’t have the ability or track record of raising capital, funds that don’t have marketing materials and funds that don’t have a deep experience on their team that’s directly connected to what they’re investing in in their hedge fund.

This is Richard Wilson coming to you from Nice, France. Thanks for joining me and we’ll see you again next time.

Again, this video should not be taken as financial advice, please refer to your financial or legal adviser.  I do hope that hedge fund investors like family offices, institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals will keep these red flags in mind while investing in hedge funds.  

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Hedge Fund Investors

In the following video, I explain what types of investors that hedge funds pursue, why they target these investors, how that changes as a hedge fund’s assets under management increases and why it is important that you understand this concept if you are in the hedge fund industry, looking to raise capital or starting a hedge fund.

Video Transcript/SummaryThe strategies and tips provided within this video module include:

  1. If you are a hedge fund that manages $100,000 to $10 million then you are really limited in what investors you can target.
  2. At this small of a size, you should look to hedge fund seeders, friends and family, and small wealth management firms.
  3. The next group is $10 million to $100 million.  There is a small percentage of institutional investors and fund of funds that will consider hedge funds of this size.
  4. At this level, your sweet spot is wealth management firms, high-net-worth individuals, seed capital providers and small family offices.
  5. Once you reach the $100 million+ AUM level you are “institutional-quality” and you have many more doors open to you in capital raising.
  6. When you get to this level you can market your hedge fund to family offices, institutional investors, wealth management firms, etc.
  7. At $1 billion all doors are open and your concerns will likely shift to performance, business management, risk management and other non-AUM aspects of your hedge fund.  

Transcript of Hedge Fund Investors:

Hello, this is Richard Wilson and welcome to this short video on Hedge Fund Investors. In this video I’m going to explain to you what types of investors hedge funds go after, why they focus on those types, how that totally changes as the hedge fund moves from a $1M to $30M to a $100M to a billion dollars plus, and why it’s really important to understand this concept if you’re working in the hedge fund industry, looking to raise capital or running your own hedge fund.

Surprisingly a few people in the industry go through formal hedge fund training and that is why lots of people can work in the industry for years without knowing some of these basic facts about how it operates. Now to start with, let’s look at the bottom of the pyramid. If you’re a hedge fund that has $100K to $10M in capital under management within your hedge fund there is very limited number of investors you can go after. And before I even start to label any of these please know that all of these types of investors are generalizations. The type of investors that you can go after in your country, in your state for you to have a hedge fund could be different.

So these are general guidelines, what types of investors hedge funds typically go after. It’s not set in stone and don’t take any action with hedge marketing or capital raising till you’ve spoken with somebody in your compliance department or an attorney that’s an expert on these issues. But now if you’re a hedge fund that manages a $100K to $10M in capital pretty much have limited options in the front of you. You can go after friends and family, small wealth management firms or some hedge fund seeders or fund to fund that seed small startup hedge fund managers or emerging managers as they’re called.

Really your options are limited here because people don’t trust that you’re going to be in business a year or two from now. They don’t trust that you have a talented team typically, that you don’t have a long enough track record, that your business really isn’t set up yet or profitable enough yet to survive long-term.

The second group here is $10M to $100M in assets. And these are often referred as emerging managers still and there’s a small percentage of “institutional investors” that will look at emerging managers. A very small percentage of institutional consultants, a very small percentage of fund to funds, some family offices and then your sweet spot in this range is really going after wealth management firms, very small family offices, high net worth individuals in a compliance approved way. Again, seed capital providers and really what you’re looking for here is people who want to take the bet on the manager which is not large yet. They don’t have hundreds and millions of dollars in capital but they can see your growth, they can see you’ve reinvested in your business, they see that you’re going in a good direction.

The next level up is when you get to $100M or more. This is when you start to be referred to as institutional quality. Many times up to $100M you’ll be called an emerging manager and many people if you’ll call them, they will almost, just hanging up right in your face if don’t have a $100M in capital or more because you’re not “institutional” enough for them. And this can get very frustrating to say the least for anyone trying to raise capital and many of you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. But when you get to this level, it opens a lot of doors for raising more capital. Do know that some institutional investors will still call you an emerging manager until you get to $250M or even $500M or more. But typically 80% of the market is calling you an institutional manager after you get to a $100M.

Now, when you get to this level you can market yourself to family offices full on to institutional consultants in most cases, to some pensions and foundations and endowments but many will require you to have those higher asset levels. And the top of the pyramid here is when you get to a billion dollars plus. I really have not heard of many allocations if any that require more than a billion dollars in capital. Even insurance plans, pension funds, endowments, foundations, ultra high net worths, the biggest single-family offices in the world — typically if you have a billion dollars that’s a sustainable business plus some.

And it’s really about the institutional quality of your risk management procedures, the consistency of your invest process, the team you have in place. It’s more about everything else going on in your business rather than asset level at that point. Once you get past $500M, $800M, a billion dollars, the AUM issue instead of being the number one roadblock in your hedge business really is just a detail and it’s the other parts of your business that become center stage.

So I hope this short summary of what types of investors exists in the hedge fund marketing, who you can go after, what stages, who hedge fund managers are raising capital firm right now today at these different levels is very helpful and educational for you. Thanks and please join us again soon. It’s Richard Wilson and keep in touch.
An important part of raising capital for your hedge fund is recognizing the different types of investors.  I hope that this video has given you a clear idea of where your hedge fund generally fits in and what investors you should be targeting.  (As always, please note that these investor types are generalizations and only serve as guidelines and do not take any action without speaking with a compliance officer or attorney who is an expert in this area.)  

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