• Multimanager firms featured prominently on the top 50 list. Perhaps as a result, they are in expansion mode and ramping up hiring in 2016.
• Many managers who once called Steven A. Cohen their boss performed well last year, led by Gabriel Plotkin, who grabbed the No. 2 spot on the top 50 ranking.
• It may be too late for some, but the lessons learned feature in this edition imparts some wisdom from this difficult year while the closures pages analyze the carnage with a non-exhaustive list of the funds that shut their doors or returned outside capital during 2015.
Bloomberg's rankings of the top-performing hedge funds are based on funds' net returns for 2015. Because hedge-fund returns can be difficult to obtain, our lists are not all-inclusive. In addition, some of the numbers were difficult to verify. Unless the information came from Bloomberg data or the hedge-fund firm itself, we tried to verify it with other sources, including investors and other fund databases. All returns are for full-year 2015; fund assets are the latest available. Onshore and offshore assets were combined for a number of funds, while figures for other funds were only for the larger or better-performing class of the fund.