HEDGE OF A YEAR
Wall St. pro makes a whopping $190K an hour
Last year, hedge fund tycoon James Simons made $194,000 — an hour, that is.
The former math professor who heads Renaissance Technologies earned $1.7 billion in 2017, making him the highestearning hedge fund manager for the third straight year, according to an annual survey by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine.
Simons edged out Appaloosa Management’s David Tepper, who earlier this month ponied up $2.2 billion in cash to buy the Carolina Panthers. Tepper earned $1. 5 billion in 2017 as his fund gained 13 percent, more than doubling his personal haul of $700 million in 2016.
Doing the math, Tepper’s daily earnings work out to $4.1 million, or $171,000 an hour.
In all, the top 25 highestearning hedgies collectively made $15.4 billion last year, averaging more than $600 million each.
That makes the compensation of chief execs like Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein — who raked in $24 million last year — look like peanuts.
Top hedgies enjoyed a 40percent bump in their earnings, compared with the $11 billion they earned in 2016.
Emboldened by surging corporate prof its and optimism about the Trump tax cuts, investors piled back into hedge funds, pouring in $30 billion after yanking out more than $100 billion in 2016, accord- ing to eVestment.
Collectively, hedge funds gained 8.6 percent in 2017, according to the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index — up from 5.6 percent in 2016. The surge was in part due to the 21.8 percent annual gain in the S&P 500 index.
Taking the third spot was Citadel’s Ken Griff in, who earned $1.4 billion as the firm’s three main funds each posted gains of roughly 13 percent.
A hedgie’s haul doesn’t necessarily reflect a fund’s perfor- mance, though. Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio was No. 4 with earnings of $1.3 billion, even though two of the firm’s funds delivered just 1.2 percent, while its All Weather strategy fund surged 13.1 percent.
Falling just short of hitting the billion-dollar mark at No. 5 was Millennium Management’s Israel Englander, who earned $975 million.