With the performance numbers now in for the first 10 months of a generally tough and at times wild year across most strategy areas, we are pleased to announce the initial nominations for the EuroHedge Awards for 2018 – the big night when the European hedge fund industry comes together to recognise and honour the outstanding performers of the year.
The winners of the 18th annual EuroHedge Awards will be announced and presented at a gala dinner on Thursday 24 January, to be held once again in the spectacular setting of the Great Room at the Grosvenor House hotel on London’s Park Lane.
As ever, the awards will be judged on an established quantitative methodology – based on a combination of Sharpe ratios and returns – to identify the best risk-adjusted performance across a range of strategies and asset classes, with the aim being to let the numbers do the talking in order to select the nominees and the eventual winners.
The EuroHedge Awards celebrate those funds and firms that have produced the best risk-adjusted returns for their investors – achieving the twin primary goals of hedge funds of capturing the upside in terms of strong absolute returns, while also controlling volatility and protecting capital on the downside.
This is reflected in our first snapshot of the early contenders for nominations for the 2018 awards – with the list of initial nominees being based on returns to the end of October.
Given the extent of the upheavals suffered by many funds in October’s market mayhem, and the potential for further volatility in the final weeks of the year, we are erring on the side of caution at this stage in terms of identifying the likely contenders for this year’s Awards.
So we must stress that the lists presented here are provisional. It is very probable – and virtually certain in most categories – that the line-ups of contenders and nominees will change once the November and December performance numbers are taken into account.
The initial nominee lists once again feature several previous award winners – and a number of funds and firms that have won multiple nominations at the EuroHedge Awards over the years.
But there are also many newer names in the industry that also feature among the early contenders – and this is before we announce our initial nominees for the New Fund of the Year and Emerging Manager & Smaller Fund awards, which will be unveiled next month.
For all the main individual strategy award categories over the one-year period we have again decided to keep the minimum asset level at $100 million.
However, as part of our effort to highlight the good performance among many smaller funds, we also continue to include the Emerging Manager & Smaller Fund category that we have featured for the past several years – for which the minimum asset bar is set at a lower level.
This year there will again be two awards for emerging manager and smaller funds – divided into two categories, in the same way as for the New Fund, Ucits and Long Term Performance awards, between those funds focusing on equity strategies and those focusing on relative value, multi-asset, macro and fixed-income strategies.
These awards aim to recognise funds that are below the $100 million threshold and which do not quality as new funds, but whose performances would have earned them clear nominations in their respective categories if they had met the minimum size requirement.
For the New Fund awards – which consider those funds with performance inception dates during the 12-month period between July 2017 and June 2018 – there is also a lower minimum asset level, reflecting the fact that many of these funds may only have been trading for a few months.
Because of the time period criteria, some new funds that launched in the second half of 2017 may also be considered for a New Fund award this year as well as for nominations in their relevant strategy category – while those newer funds that have started trading from July 2018 onwards will only be considered for awards in 2019.
This year, there are some small changes to the main award categories. In equities, alongside the award for Global Equity we also have a dedicated category for Specialist Sector Equity (comprising those funds that focus exclusively on a specific sector or group of global equity sectors such as healthcare, energy, utilities or financials).
There are separate awards again for Event Driven and Distressed, while in Credit we are again splitting the category into funds managing less than $500 million and those managing more than $500 million – as we also do for European Equity.
We are also introducing for the first time this year additional awards for Long Term Performance – judging funds over a 10-year period (to mark the 10 years that have now elapsed since the crash of 2008), in addition to the five-year Long Term Performance category that is a long-established feature of the EuroHedge Awards.
For the main individual strategy categories, we stick with the same tried-and-tested methodology as in previous years – with nominations being identified from among the funds with the strongest Sharpe ratios among their peer groups (so long as they also beat the median performance in that peer group); and with the winners being those funds with the highest returns (so long as they are within 25% of the top Sharpe ratio within their group).
In order to qualify for a nomination, a fund must also be within 10% of its high-water mark that was set before the start of this year – so that funds are not rewarded merely for recent good performance if they have not also substantially recouped losses from previous years.
For the Long Term Performance awards, both over the five-year and 10-year time-frames, the minimum asset level is set at $500 million and the awards are judged on a combination of Sharpe ratios and absolute returns over the respective time periods.
Finally, there are the awards for Management Firm of the Year (based on a quantitative scoring system that ranks absolute and relative performance across a firm’s various funds) and for the overall Fund of the Year.
For Fund of the Year, as is traditional, this award takes into account not only those funds that win the various individual categories, but also any others with exceptional performance – and the contenders will not be announced until the evening itself, not least so as to avoid pre-judging the winners in other categories.
Again, we stress that these provisional lists reflect the early contenders in the various categories and only include at this stage those funds that look most likely to feature on the eventual shortlists for the various awards when they are finalised in January.
A second round of nominations will be announced in December once the returns for November are in – which will also include the initial nominees for the Ucits, Emerging Manager & Smaller Fund, New Fund of the Year and Management Firm of the Year awards – while the final list of nominees based on the full 12-month calendar year performance will be confirmed as early as possible in January.
To be included in the nomination process, funds must appear in the EuroHedge Database. All funds that wish to be considered for nomination must be submitted to the database by Friday 7 December 2018.
To check that your fund is eligible for nomination, please contact Amy Wilcockson or Siobhan Hallissey. Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 20 7832 6680 or +44 (0) 20 7832 6677
Demand for tables is high. Tables are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. For table bookings, contact Sigita Gravere. Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 20 7832 6631
For sponsorship enquiries, contact James Barfield. Email: [email protected] Tel: +1 646 931 9058
EuroHedge Awards 2018 – Initial nominations
Early contenders include:
EUROPEAN EQUITY – under $500m
EUROPEAN EQUITY – over $500m
GLOBAL EQUITY
SPECIALIST SECTOR EQUITY
EQUITY MARKET NEUTRAL & QUANTITATIVE STRATEGIES
CONVERTIBLES & VOLATILITY
EVENT DRIVEN
DISTRESSED
CREDIT – under $500m
CREDIT– over $500m
FIXED INCOME
SPECIALIST FINANCE
COMMODITY & CURRENCY
MACRO
EMERGING MARKETS
MULTI-STRATEGY
MANAGED FUTURES
UCITS FUND
Nominees to be announced next month
EMERGING MANAGER & SMALLER FUND
Nominees to be announced next month
NEW FUND OF THE YEAR
Nominees to be announced next month
LONG TERM PERFORMANCE (5 years) – EQUITY STRATEGIES
LONG TERM PERFORMANCE (5 years) – MACRO, FIXED INCOME & RELATIVE VALUE
LONG TERM PERFORMANCE (10 years) – EQUITY STRATEGIES
LONG TERM PERFORMANCE (10 years) – MACRO, FIXED INCOME & RELATIVE VALUE
MANAGEMENT FIRM OF THE YEAR
Nominees to be announced next month
FUND OF THE YEAR
Nominees to be announced on the night
EuroHedge Awards 2018: initial nominations announced on EuroHedge.