Investors are likely to be forgiving. Hibbert’s track record is a rare achievement in the $4 trillion hedge fund industry, where his peers have captured most of the market’s downside in recent years, but very little of the upside. When the S&P 500 tumbled 12% in March 2020 as the pandemic spread, 87% of equity hedge funds in a Bloomberg index lost money, with half declining by more than 10%. Hibbert was down just 0.5% that month.

Fed-up clients have pulled almost $70 billion from long-short equity hedge funds since the start of 2019, according to data from eVestment. In contrast, Hibbert’s fund isn’t taking new money and there’s a waiting list of investors eager to replace anyone that wants out, the people said. 

Hibbert has worked alongside some of Britain’s best-known money managers in his more than two decade career, from famed investor Nick Train in the 1990s to fallen star stockpicker Neil Woodford. His previous employer was Scottish Widows Investment Partnership where he worked with Nigel Bolton, now co-chief investment officer of BlackRock’s fundamental equity group. In 2008, Hibbert and a team of colleagues followed Bolton to the investment giant. 

“It was clear he had a very bright future in the industry thanks to his talent and dedication,” said veteran money manager Rory Powe, who worked with Hibbert at Invesco Ltd. and is now a portfolio manager at Man Group Plc.  

Hibbert runs the Strategic Equity hedge fund with long time colleague Michael Constantis and three analysts, and has the final call on investments. Clients and acquaintances describe Hibbert as intellectually curious and an avid student of economic history as well as industries and companies—an equity long-short manager with a macro thinking hat. He’s also adept at clearly distilling vast amounts of data into big picture and fundamental views, they said. If he loses money, he will call immediately to explain his thinking, said an investor.

He is “incredibly capable and knowledgeable of the stocks he owns,” said Richard Philbin, chief investment officer of Wellian Investment Solutions, which invested clients’ capital in Hibbert’s long-only funds. He “has a very flexible investment style — not a dogmatic value or growth manager for instance, although it is fair to suggest there is a growth bias to his investment approach.”

The Strategic Equity fund returned 37% last year in its best annual performance yet. The gross gains were closer to 50% and would have earned around $480 million in estimated fees for BlackRock, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on the fund’s 20% incentive charge to clients. The firm earned a record $1.1 billion in performance fees in that period.

While the share of profits allocated to Hibbert and his team is unknown, people familiar with BlackRock's practices said the group would likely retain half of the fees. And industry standards would set Hibbert’s share at roughly 25% or about $120 million. Much of that would typically be deferred, and it's common for managers to reinvest a large portion of fees they earn in their own funds. If Hibbert did that since Strategic Equity’s launch in 2011, he could have made $350 million just from his hedge fund alone, according to Bloomberg calculations.

A recent earnings call hints at BlackRock’s outsized reliance on Hibbert’s fund, which was up just 2.3% at the end of September. Discussing third-quarter results earlier this month, Chief Financial Officer Gary Shedlin said firm-wide performance fees of $345 million were down from a year earlier after a decrease in revenue from a single hedge fund that delivered a “truly exceptional performance” in 2020.

Hibbert also began managing a global long-only equity portfolio last year, focusing on a smaller number of bets. The BlackRock Global Unconstrained Equity Fund has just over 300 million pounds ($412 million) of assets and is up 24% this year. It had 23 holdings as of Sept. 30.