HF fee squeeze: Not such a new thing
Jul 21st, 2009 | Filed under: Investment Management Fees, Today's Post
As this article from Pensions & Investments points out, the long-awaited drop in hedge fund fees may finally have arrived. Although performance fees – a significant portion of overall fees – have recently dropped to zero percent across a wide swath of funds, P&I observes this week that:
“Some hedge fund managers — including Renaissance, Citadel and Diamondback — are heeding the call from institutional investors, setting up new funds, share classes or better-priced offerings.”
While fee pressure may appear to be a relatively new phenomenon, research in the past has shown that in aggregate, investors have been forcing down the fees charged by higher risk hedge funds. A study written in October 2008 by Gavin Cassar at Wharton and Joseph Gerakos of the University of Chicago found…
“…a positive association between the quality of internal controls and the performance fees rewarded to managers, consistent with investors protecting against potential financial misstatements by placing less emphasis on the reported performance when internal controls are less likely to detect or prevent managers from manipulating reported performance.”
In other words, investors have always put pressure on riskier funds by forcing them to charge lower performance fees. However, unlike the current flavor of hedge fund investor activism, this pressure seems to have resulted from investors simply voting with their wallets and avoiding riskier, unproven funds – thus forcing them to lower their fees to attract capital.
These charts from the paper confirms data we presented in this post a few months ago, showing that less than half of all funds actually charge a 2% management fee… More…
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[...] Funds and Mutual Funds (should be) dropping their fees. All About Alpha and NY [...]
Investors will begin to invest into passive products such as ETS to avoid paying high fees for the fund managers who are unlikely to outperform their stated benchmarks. It seems that consolidation seems inevitable in asset management industry to compansate diminishing management fees.
For hedge funds that actually deploy hedge fund strategies, i.e. those that are prone to the generation of absolute returns and the protection of the capital in market dislocations, the debate on hedge fund fees is futile and will lead nowhere.
I would like to suggest the following link to elaborate on the above:
http://mountjoycapital.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/There_Is_Nothing_Wrong_With_The_Hedge_Fund_Fees.250230316.pdf