Total hedge fund assets fell an additional 5.2% in November to US$2.11 trillion largely due to investors redeeming a record US$130.04 billion during the month, HedgeFund net said Tuesday.

Fund performance losses slowed in November, the firm said, although returns remained negative for the sixth month in a row.

The HFN Hedge Fund Aggregate Average, an equal weighted benchmark of all single manager hedge funds and CTA/managed futures products in the HedgeFund.net database, was down 0.47% in November and is off 14.75% in the year to date.

HedgeFun.net said that the process of investor redemptions is not immediate and mounting losses during the year may have led to the spike in redemptions in both October and November. “The hedge fund industry is in its largest ever drawdown and redemption requests likely exacerbated the situation due to forced selling,” it said.

Additionally, the firm reported that hedge fund losses in November were most highly concentrated in equity related strategies, but emerging markets and distressed strategies continued to report larger than average losses. “Long only, small/micro cap and technology focused managers were most negatively impacted while short biased, healthcare and market neutral equity related strategies fared better,” it said.

“Fixed income managers, both arbitrage and directional strategies benefited from an improvement in liquidity measures and rapidly declining treasury yields, the exception being convertible arbitrage strategies which continued to suffer.”

IE