Rare slide trims Singer hedge brand

Hedge fund mogul Paul Singer started off 2015 with a rare miss— the first quarter in almost three years that one of his hedge funds has been down and one of only 12 in his stellar 38year run.

Singer’s Elliott International hedge fund fell half a percentage point in the first three months. While Singer has made headlines for his decadelong battle with Argentina over defaulted debt, investors in his $ 25 billion firm, Elliott Management, know him best for stable returns. And the loss, however small, undercuts one of his chief selling points.

During the past five years, Elliott gained between 8 percent and 9 percent annualized, depending on the fund. That’s below the S& P 500, but within the target return for most institutional investors.

The recent fiveyear performance is lower than the annualized return since the inception in 1977 of about 13.8 percent in his oldest fund, Elliott Associates. It had an even higher annualized return of 17 percent in its first 10 years.

But if Singer’s best years are behind him, no one seems bothered.

“He has been declining since 1986,” said Brian Shapiro of Simplify, a hedge fund research firm that provided the returns to The Post. “But his down slope is like everybody else’s dream.”

Elliott Associates, which was flat this past quarter, has had only 11 down quarters out of 153. Elliott International, launched in 1995 and catering to institutional investors, has had seven down quarters. The funds have lost money only in two years, 1998 and 2008.

Elliott’s losses typically occur in periods of financial crisis. Not so this year, when he failed to deliver with two popular hedge fund strategies: activism and energy.