AQR Multistrategy Returns 15% in 2024 on Equity, Macro Gains

(Bloomberg) — AQR Capital Management’s multistrategy offering notched a 15.1% return in 2024, scoring big gains in the stock market even as co-founder Cliff Asness reiterated his warnings about “epic” valuations.

The $2.3 billion Apex, which combines a variety of the quant firm’s trades, posted another year of double-digit gains, profiting from its stock-picking and macro trading, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified as the information is private.

The $2.2 billion AQR Delphi Long-Short Equity Strategy — which favors high-quality, low-risk stocks — jumped 24.1% in 2024, the person said. The smaller AQR Equity Market Neutral Fund returned 25.3%, beating 96% of funds in that category, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

All told, it caps another solid year in the Greenwich, Connecticut-based firm’s post-pandemic comeback, fueled by a higher-rate era that has given hedge funds plenty more trading opportunities. 

AQR’s Apex roughly matched the performance of the key funds at Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management. The group has been gaining popularity within the hedge fund industry, with traditional quant funds like D.E. Shaw also raising their profile as a multistrategy firm.

Beyond stocks, the firm’s $2.5 billion Helix strategy, which trades trends across alternative markets, rose 17.9%, the person said, compared with 2.56% for Societe Generale’s gauge of trend-following funds. That program benefited from trends in stock factors and yield curves. 

Despite the good results, the ever-combative Asness could be found Thursday essaying sarcastically on the firm’s website about the latent perils of blindly going long the US stock market at a time of elevated valuations.

In a satirical post written from the perspective of a made-up allocator, he imagined their disappointment a decade from now. “It turned out that paying an epic multiple for the U.S.A. compared to the rest of the world mattered somewhat more than we thought, and international diversification, as we knew it would one day, did eventually work,” he wrote. 

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