The Billion Dollar Club is Bulging Out All Over

Gauging the growth of the hedge fund industry is a notoriously tricky affair. This is partly because many of these investment pools are not required to give financial information. Then too it also doesn't help the term “hedge fund” has no formal definition.

With those caveats, there are some extremely large numbers coming out of the latest survey from Absolute Return magazine, a unit of HedgeFund Intelligence. Called the Billion Dollar Club survey, the semiannual report tracks hedge funds with more than $1 billion under management.

The survey found 218 U.S. funds that topped the $1 billion mark, with combined assets of $984 billion as of July 1. In August 2005, the survey found 196 billion-plus firms with a total of $743 billion in assets.

The distribution is heavily weighted toward the biggest of the big. Less than 10 percent of the funds control one-third of the total assets among survey participants; the top four control more than $20 billion each.

Who are these Big Four? The survey names Goldman Sachs Asset Management as the biggest, with $29.5 billion in assets, followed by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, with $28.8 billion; Bridgewater Associates, with $28 billion; and D.E. Shaw with $23.3 billion.

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