AQR Capital Management’s multi-strategy product returned 15.1% in 2024, outperforming the stock market even as co-founder Cliff Asness reaffirmed his concerns about “epic” values.
The $2.3 billion Apex, which incorporates a mix of the quant firm’s trades, produced another year of double-digit profits, benefiting from stock-picking and macro trading, according to a person familiar with the subject who declined to be identified because the information is confidential.
According to the individual, the $2.2 billion AQR Delphi Long-Short Equity Strategy, which emphasizes high-quality, low-risk firms, increased by 24.1% in 2024. According to Bloomberg data, the smaller AQR Equity Market Neutral Fund returned 25.3%, outperforming 96% of other funds in the category.
Overall, it marks another successful year in the Greenwich, Connecticut-based firm’s post-pandemic recovery, aided by a higher-rate environment providing hedge funds with several trading opportunities.
AQR’s Apex performed similarly to the flagship funds of Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management. The group is gaining popularity in the hedge fund market, with conventional quant funds such as D.E. Shaw expanding their profile as multi-strategic firms.
Beyond equities, the firm’s $2.5 billion Helix strategy, which trades trends in alternative markets, increased 17.9%, according to the source, compared to 2.56% for Societe Generale’s trend-following fund index. That program profited from changes in stock factors and yield curves.
Despite the positive results, the ever-competitive Asness could be found on Thursday writing sarcastically on the firm’s website about the dangers of going long the US stock market at a time of high valuations.
In a satirical post written from the perspective of a made-up allocator, he imagined their disappointment a decade from now. “It turned out that paying an epic multiple for the U.S.A. compared to the rest of the world mattered somewhat more than we thought, and international diversification, as we knew it would one day, eventually worked,” he wrote.
