What's up with Mercer blaming 'political pressure,' bad press and even investor bad timing for hedge fund ills
The big NY talent consultant counters the national media's growing attention to the stumbles and pitfalls of these managers of $3 trillion of assets
8 min read- Mercer defends hedge funds, blaming negative press and politics for industry struggles.
- Report emphasizes manager selection as key to hedge fund success, downplaying closure concerns.
- Hedge fund redemptions by NYCERS and ERSRI followed underperformance, fueling negative sentiment.
Brooke’s Note: When you can charge double the industry norm for asset management, take 20% of the profits, live without transparency, get regulators to look the other way and often be oversubscribed in your funds, then you are the hedge fund industry and the power of your PR is beyond just about anything Wall Street and the free enterprise system has ever come up with. In fact, you are your PR, much more than your lackluster returns. When that power starts to unravel, it is not an ordinary challenge with ordinary stakes. It may explain the odd presence of Mercer in the picture.
In what may be a sign of desperate PR times, Mercer LLC has become de facto super PAC for the hedge fund industry — countering the media’s treatment of each setback for hedge funds with a blitz of favorable PR spin for the managers of that $3 trillion pool of assets.
Most recently the New York-based global talent recruiter and consultancy’s investment division sent out a press release — accompanied by a report, The Ebb and Flow of the Hedge Fund Industry in April — taking aim at journalists and politicians for bad PR that is hitting hedge funds — as if skepticism relates little in the long-term to redemptions, massive fees, lackluster returns and the dilution of talent spawned by an explosion of the funds.
120 for one
Mercer indeed suggests that in assessing talent my be the solution the hedge fund industry malaise.
“Successful hedge fund investing is predicated on investing with the best active managers in the world, so manager selection is key,” says Mercer’s Scott Zipfel, a principal and hedge fund research analyst. Mercer has more than 120 employees, worldwide, performing due diligence on and helping clients select fund managers.
The talent firm counsels readers to take a rearview-mirror perspective on hedge funds in its report.
A chart illustrating Mercer’s view that active hedge managers are the most important factor in a fund’s success.
“Despite attention-grabbing headlines proclaiming the decline of the hedge fund industry, we do not believe that much actually has changed. In our opinion, a historical perspective diminishes many of these concerns,” reads the Mercer report.
Cliffwater reports that 87% of state pensions earned 10-year returns that exceeded the 6.8% return that would have been achieved by a 60/40 “buy and hold” mix of stock and bond index funds. Cliffwater attributes this to investments in real estate, hedge funds, and other alternatives.
While acknowledging that 2015 was a “disappointing” one for hedge funds — amid flat markets, the average hedge fund lost about 1% — the media made a regrettable situation worse with an alarmist spin, it suggests.
Chasing bad performance: Why investors can't get enough of those increasingly lame hedge funds
Minority Report
“We believe that concern about a 'record’ amount of hedge fund closures in 2015 requires perspective. Although more fund closures occurred in 2015 than in any year since the financial crisis, the margin of difference actually was minor,” the report reads.
Mercer issued its most recent release in the wake the New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS) announcing In April that the New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS) announced it was cashing out its hedge fund portfolio of $3 billion, citing underperformance by the hedge fund managers. See: A hedgie defends hedge funds — and their disparaged managers — amid a tough PR run for the category.
A month earlier the Employees’ Retirement System of Rhode Island (ERSRI) announced it was withdrawing $35 million managed by New York hedge fund Luxor Capital Group LP, which had posted losses of over 18% in the preceding two years.
In 2004, when ERSRI announced it was withdrawing $35 million managed by New York hedge fund Luxor Capital Group LP, which had posted losses of over 18% in the preceding two years, it was on the advice of a Mercer competitor, Cliffwater LLC of Marina del Rey, Calif., which advises on roughly $55 billion in alternative assets invested in hedge funds.
No bail trail
Zipfel acknowledges that there are scenarios under which Mercer would advise a client to bail on a hedge fund, but would not elaborate of what those circumstances might be.
Story Timeline
He declined to disclose exactly what criteria Mercer employs to rate and select fund managers, how many hedge fund managers make up its list of the best of the best, and under what circumstances Mercer would cut a hedge fund loose.
Mercer had also jumped to hedge fund defense after CalPERS, the nation’s largest public employees’ pension fund pulled out of hedge funds in September 2014, chief investment officer Ted Eliopoulos stressed the complexity, cost and scale of the products. Performance, he said, was not an issue.See: CalPERS’s hatchet man, Ted Eliopoulos, goes on a manager firing spree, shaving hundreds of millions in management fees — but is it enough?.
Following CalPERS recusal, Mercer did Eliopoulos one better by publishing a report reaffirming its position that hedge funds can provide both long-term growth and diversification from other asset classes. At that point, Mercer was able to demonstrate that hedge funds had outperformed the broad equities markets on a consistent basis. Mercer touted hedge funds’ ability to deliver “equity like returns with bond-like volatility.”
What neither CalPERs nor Mercer stressed were issues raised last week in a Yahoo! article also took a swat at hedge funds — and which may explain why stewards of billions are moving from hedge funds.
A hedgie defends hedge funds -- and their disparaged managers -- amid a tough PR run for the category
Carried interest
Yahoo! quoted Joe Brusuelas, chief economist for consulting and accounting firm RSM who said the carried-interest tax provision — which some fund managers to declare investment income as a capital gain, at a 20% tax rate, half the top income rate of 39.6% — is a dead duck after the November elections:
“It appears, regardless of who wins the election, hedge fund managers are going to see the end of the carried interest provision,” he told Yahoo!.
Meanwhile, he added that the days of clients stomaching the so-called two-and-20 fee structure hedge funds charge their clients — a 2% fee on AUM, plus 20% of any gains — are limited.
But the hedge fund cataclysm will come if the federal government declares that they fall under bank-like rules of reserves, Brusuelas adds in the article.
The better news for the hedge fund industry is that it produced the best aggregate performance in two years this March, according to eVestment’s latest Hedge Fund Performance Report, with the company’s Hedge Fund Aggregate rising +2.29% for the month. It notes that nearly 70% of hedge funds produced positive returns in that period.
'Considered newsworthy’
In addition to an unsympathetic press, even larger forces were at work, according to the report.
“We understand that when a large investor publicly eliminates its hedge fund program the action is considered newsworthy. However, more factors than are mentioned publicly (such as political pressure) are often what drive such decisions.”
It’s a stretch to cast the hedge fund industry as a defenseless damsel. In the first 13 months of the election season, it has lavished about $47 million from two dozen of the industry’s top managers on presidential candidates, lawmakers and the political action committees that support them, according to a Reuters’ review of Federal Election Commission filings.
Investors themselves are not blameless, says Zipfel. “Those who redeemed in the first half of the first quarter missed the rebound in the second half,” he says. “Those who redeemed in the first half of the first quarter missed the rebound in the second half,” says a principal and Mercer and hedge fund research analyst.
All about the talent
In addition to being a talent recruiter and a consultancy, Mercer also creates model portfolios that represent a material allocation to hedge funds, says a Mercer brochure. The firm, however, declined to identify the number of managers it recommends or the criteria for putting them on or taking them off its list. Mercer does not publish any composite that demonstrates whether the results that these managers obtain for their clients are superior to the industry average.
Massive redemptions, coupled with other performance losses of $43.2 billion in January, caused global hedge fund assets to plunge to $64.7 billion for ther month, dropping total industry assets under management to $2.96 trillion — marking the first time since 2014 that cumulative hedge fund AUM has dropped below the psychologically important $3 trillion level, according to research firm eVestment in Marietta, Ga.
Correction: A previous version of this article characterized Mercer as a firm that does recruiting and that the pres release emanated from that portion of the company. Mercer does HR consulting but no recruiting and the release came from the investments side of the business. We regret the error. We are also still trying to better understand and describe Mercer’s juxtaposition to the hedge fund business and will try to clarify as today, May 19th, progresses.
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