Bridgewater, D.E. Shaw among top hedge fund gainers of 2025

Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha II overall fund returned 34% last year, its best ever, while the All Weather strategy was up 20%, a person familiar with the matter said, requesting anonymity while discussing private information. DE Shaw’s flagship multi-strategy composite hedge fund gained 18.5% and Oculus gained an estimated 28.2%.

Another person said Michel Massoud’s Melkart Opportunity Fund was up 45%. Millennium Management, an $83.5 billion multi-strategy hedge fund firm, rose 10.5% last year. ExodusPoint, which is building its own equity group to complement fixed income operations led by co-founder Michael Gelband, posted gains of 18%, the most since its founding in 2017. The company has about $12 billion under management.

Citadel’s flagship hedge fund posted a 10.2% increase in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity citing private information. This was the first year that Millennium had outperformed Citadel’s Wellington fund since 2020.

Read more: Citadel’s flagship hedge fund rose 10.2% last year

Preliminary estimates show that hedge funds generally posted strong gains with industry returns on track to be the best in at least five years, helped by a rally in U.S. stocks and precious metals and volatility in bond and currency markets stimulated by president Donald Trump’s trade wars.

Bridgewater, which is 50 years old, has generated double-digit returns across strategies. The money manager has been in reboot mode since Nir Bar Diya became sole CEO in 2023 and has made sweeping staff changes and asset cuts in a bid to boost performance. The founder of the Westport, Connecticut-based billionaire Ray Dalio exited the company entirely, selling his remaining stake and resigning from the board of directors last year.

Bloomberg previously reported that gains for Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha II fund last year represented a rebound from annual returns of less than 3% between 2012 and 2024. The person added that the firm’s AIA Labs fund, which uses machine learning as a primary foundation for decision-making, raised more than $5 billion and was up 11% last year.

In the world of quantitative investing, AQR Capital Management’s multi-strategy offering returned 19.6% in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because the information is private.

Read more: AQR Multistrategy Apex Gains 19.6% in Turbulent Quant Year

Here’s how other hedge funds performed last year based on preliminary estimates:

A representative for Bridgewater, which managed $92 billion as of September, declined to comment. Masoud, who manages about $1.4 billion, as well as representatives of the hedge funds mentioned in the table, declined to comment.