A year that began with artificial intelligence jitters and geopolitical-driven sell-offs is ending with equity markets near record highs, thanks to the continued growth of the world’s biggest tech companies.
For many hedge funds trading these markets, 2025 was a choppy but ultimately strong year. While few funds have been able to match the returns of the S&P 500, the average manager was up 10.7% through November, according to industry data tracker PivotalPath.
In many ways, the $5 trillion industry is at a crossroads. Hedge funds are more institutionalized than ever, grappling with soaring talent costs, an arms race in technology and AI, and the pressure to deliver market-beating returns from the world’s largest pools of capital.
With that in mind, here are the 10 hedge funds to watch in 2026. There is no particular order to the list, but those selected are managers who, for one reason or another, the industry is talking about. That means new launches from pedigreed founders, evolving titans, struggling upstarts, and more.
The firms below declined to comment.
Coatue Management
Philippe Laffont‘s long-running Tiger Cub, Coatue Management, is bigger than ever before and more publicly visible than ever before. The $70 billion firm, long a player in the secretive world of Silicon Valley venture investing, has opened up access to smaller investors with at least $50,000 to invest in a new fund that counts OpenAI and Stripe as significant positions. This year, the firm’s executives, including Laffont and his brother, Thomas, have been a constant presence on industry podcasts, conference panels, and CNBC, and the manager is publishing daily, public research notes called C:/Takes.
It’s a significant departure from the insular style hedge funds typically operate with, but it has not slowed the firm’s performance. The flagship hedge is up more than 13% through November, a person familiar with the manager’s returns told Business Insider.
Jain Global
Bobby Jain’s firm was one of the industry’s biggest launches ever and certainly one of the buzziest. When Jain Global started trading in mid-2024, it immediately began trading different asset classes around the world and competing with industry stalwarts for talent and capital.
Eighteen months later, the firm’s net performance has lagged its multistrategy peers. A person familiar with the firm’s returns said Jain has produced gross gains in the mid-teens since launch, but fees associated with building a new firm from scratch and hiring dozens of investors, tech workers, and risk managers have reduced the end performance to less than 4%. Additionally, the manager, which now runs close to $6 billion, did not immediately start deploying all of its capital, so potential gains were muted as PMs were onboarded.
The three-year mark, by which many new launches are judged, is still more than a year away, but given the prominence of the launch, there’ll be plenty of attention on the end results for Jain in 2026. The manager now has more than 400 employees across five offices and was able to raise $600 million for a bank loan insurance fund run by former D.E. Shaw investor Syril Pathmanathan earlier this year.
Point72 Asset Management
Steve Cohen will always be known as a stockpicker, even if he is no longer trading a book for his firm, Point72. It’s how he made his name and first billions in finance, and it’s what Point72’s bread-and-butter still is in many ways. The firm is even starting another equities unit in 2026 to give its portfolio managers more access to top corporate executives.
But the firm has continued to branch out and diversify. The manager’s macro buildout and venture bets are well-known, and, more recently, Point72 launched a dedicated fund for investing in AI and plans to start a $1 billion private credit fund. The firm’s quant arm, Cubist, meanwhile, is under new leadership, and people close to the manager told Business Insider that Cohen has told investors that commodities may be the next area of expansion.
Harvey Capital
While launches from a new member of the Tiger Cub family, one of the big multistrategy funds, or even an OpenAI researcher might garner more press, Harvey Capital is the type of hedge fund that could scale quickly.
Founded by King Street Capital partner Paul Goldschmid, Harvey will invest in credit globally and across different complexes and situations. Named after Goldschmid’s father, the New York-based manager began trading earlier in the fourth quarter with $1 billion in assets.
Allocators are interested in the steady returns offered by credit funds. Capital flexibility is most critical for credit investors in today’s markets as funds need the “ability to take advantage of opportunities regardless of external conditions,” according to a recent JPMorgan Asset Management report. For example, distressed-only investors, the report stated, could struggle in certain environments given the “episodic” nature of the space.
CenterBook Partners
More data is better than less. That’s part of the pitch for potential investors in CenterBook Partners, a quasi-new-age fund of funds that partners with external managers and selects the best ideas from their portfolios for its own. Started by former Lone Pine executive and Conatus Capital founder David Stemerman in 2023, the firm is up 5.6% this year through November in its main fund and now manages $1.3 billion, a person close to the manager said.
Within many multistrategy giants, alpha capture has been a significant moneymaker, as a centralized quant team can craft an efficient portfolio, known as a center book, based on the trades and holdings of the dozens of internal teams within their firms. Stemerman and his team are hoping to replicate that return stream, but without the high cost of hiring their own legions of portfolio managers.
Millennium Management
Potentially the biggest industry story of 2025 was Millennium selling a stake. The massive firm was valued at $14 billion in the transaction, and, while there’s no timeline for founder Izzy Englander to step down, Millennium has built a deep leadership bench ready to take the reins when the billionaire does.
But it hasn’t been completely smooth sledding this year for the firm. The manager lost money during the chaotic period in the spring when President Donald Trump implemented his tariffs. More recently, one of the behemoth’s favorite trades, index rebalancing, was hit hard, resulting in November losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The industry’s biggest employer enters 2026 with more capital and people than ever and an eye on new private-market strategies.
Numerai
The young startup is a mix of a data science company and an investing platform, but big names are certainly interested in what it has to offer. Investors in the firm include macro investing legend Paul Tudor Jones, and Numerai made a deal with JPMorgan’s alternative asset management arm this year to give the bank $500 million in capacity.
Right now, the firm manages $550 million, according to a person close to the firm, a total that does not include JPMorgan’s capital and is 10 times what Numerai ran in 2021. The firm first launched as a data science competition in 2015 and evolved from there.
The firm still runs a global competition for data scientists who submit stock market signals to the company. Numerai, which was valued at $500 million in a fundraising round in November, then uses a proprietary AI to blend the signals together into a cohesive strategy that trades global stocks.
The goal, according to founder and CEO Richard Craib, is to create “the world’s last hedge fund.” Through November, the fund is up 6.9%, the person close to Numerai said. In 2024, the fund was up 25.5%, its best year on record.
Capital Fund Management
The Paris-based quant turns 35 next year, but its expansion in recent years has the industry’s chattering class abuzz.
Performance has to do with part of it. CFM’s largest fund, Stratus, is up 6.5% through November, according to a person close to the manager, and the firm returned $2 billion to investors after hitting $21 billion in assets earlier this year.
But an academic, collaborative culture that has drawn doctorates and AI researchers to the firm is also catching the industry’s eye. The manager’s headcount has gone from 260 in 2020 to roughly 450 today, and CFM opened a new office in Toronto this year.
“We want to win, but not at the cost of having a work environment that’s not sustainable,” said the firm’s president, Philippe Jordan, in an interview with Business Insider earlier this year.
New Holland Capital
Scale is more important than ever in hedge-fund land, but a smaller investment platform decided 2025 was the time to dive into the talent war headfirst. New Holland, which manages $6.8 billion, had been known for investing in emerging funds, and the New York-based firm is active in the space.
But this year brought the launch of the firm’s internal investing platform, called Plum Island Partners, headed by former North Rock executive Omar Qaiser. The focus, the firm said in a note about the new unit, will still be on niche, capacity-constrained strategies — now talent can choose between taking capital and setting up their own shop or coming in-house.
“We’re trying to be indifferent — we want to find good talent and have a home for them,” said New Holland CEO Scott Radke in an interview with Business Insider about the unit earlier this year.
Avantyr Capital Partners
The latest Viking Global executive to start his own fund, Ning Jin’s new firm has assembled a day-one team with serious pedigrees. Among the investing team are veterans from Coatue, Tourbillon, Blackstone, KKR, and other notable firms.
It’s been a challenge for founders to launch a new fund without accepting money via a separately managed account, which often gives allocators more transparency into a fund and can be a more burdensome operationally for a new launch. Only big names are able to raise significant capital without accepting SMA money, and, according to people close to Avantyr, Jin’s new manager falls in that category, with $1.5 billion in the firm’s commingled fund.
The firm started trading in the fourth quarter.
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