Insights from Miami Hedge Fund Week 2025

I have been going to Miami hedge fund week for well over a decade and this year was the biggest one yet.

Here are the five key takeaways from the 2025 events:

Confidence

The industry is managing a record amount of assets (approx. $5 trillion) and performance was strong last year. Managers think the Trump presidency means a return of “animal spirits” with increased market volatility globally leading to opportunities for increased alpha, and investors agree.

Evolution

How investors allocate capital and how managers run that money is evolving. The multi-strategy firms which attract so much institutional capital are increasingly running that money not only internally but externally too, allocating to other managers. In this way, they resemble the old fund of funds model. Meanwhile the old co-mingled fund model whereby there was a single main fund run by single managers is increasingly being cannibalised by separately managed accounts for investors which grant greater control to the allocator but increased complexity for the manager. And finally the growth of interval funds in the US and UCITS funds in Europe means many big names in the space are now available to mass affluent audiences for the first time.

Globalisation

Many of the big funds which used to be either in the US or UK are now in both the US and UK and often either Hong Kong or Singapore too. As the investor base become more global as sovereign wealth funds, pensions, endowments and families internationally allocate to the industry, so managers have become more global in their office footprint. This globalisation was evident in Miami in terms of where investors and managers were flying in from, with many coming in from Asia and Europe as well as North America.

Back to the future

As the industry evolves, so there is also a movement among some specialist investors “back to the future” to the original model of hedge funds. These firms do complex and difficult strategies which cannot be done passively and do so with high conviction, delivering strong outperformance. Typically, their strategies have capacity constraints and so these funds cannot become big asset gathering machines. Some of the top performing funds last year followed this approach and they were much in demand in Miami.

Media interest

Miami has long been attended by the specialist correspondents covering the industry based in the US, but now their colleagues are coming from London and other industry centres internationally. They are attracted by the presence of the biggest names in the industry at events where speeches and panels are often on the record, generating a significant amount of coverage. There are also many background meetings taking place around the events, with much of this being organised by industry communications professionals.

Christen Thomson is a Senior Counsel at CDR, specialising in hedge funds and other alternative investments.