Even elite money managers are struggling to pick winners in this year’s vicious market.

The top stocks favored by hedge funds are doing even worse than all the major benchmarks this year, based on an ETF tracking the cohort. The $151 million Goldman Sachs Hedge Industry VIP ETF (ticker GVIP) has tumbled 23%, falling more than funds that track the S&P 500, the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Russell 2000.

GVIP tracks an index that consists of the 50 stocks that appear most frequently among the top ten holdings of US hedge funds. The index, based on 13F filings of hedge fund managers, is rebalanced quarterly. The stocks are equally weighted at each rebalance.

The ETF has had the greatest exposure to the technology sector throughout this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Some of GVIP’s top tech holdings include Zendesk Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Tech stocks had plummeted at the start of this year as rising prices stoked fears that higher interest rates could weigh on valuations. While technology has somewhat rebounded in the past two months, it is still among the worst-performing sectors this year.

“It is not unusual that hedge fund investors overweight technology,” said Arthur Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth. “There’s much more beta,” referring to a measure of a stock’s volatility. The higher the beta, the greater the chance of more reward but also more risk.

Recent picks by hedge funds don’t appear to be performing well this quarter either. The S&P 500 companies that saw the biggest increases in hedge-fund ownership in the second quarter have mostly been underperforming so far this quarter, according to Lori Calvasina, head of US equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets. This includes Boston Properties Inc. and Warner Bros Discovery Inc., according to Calvasina.

Conversely, many of the names that saw the biggest declines in hedge fund ownership have been outperforming over the same period, she said. This includes Amazon.com Inc. and On Semiconductor Corp.

To be sure, it’s not all bad news for hedge funds, since long positions are typically just one side of their book. The $19 million iM DBi Hedge Strategy ETF (DBEH), which emulates both the long and short side of a hedge-fund strategy, has fallen just 2% this year.

--With assistance from Vildana Hajric and Lu Wang.

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.