By Nell Mackenzie
LONDON (Reuters) -London-listed Man Group reported on Thursday an 8% rise in assets under management to $174.9 billion for the year to Sept. 30, despite a large client redemption in the third quarter.
The assets under management were, however, slightly below $175.5 billion expected by analysts.
Shares in the company were last down 2%, close to this year’s low of 203.8 pence and down 10.5% so far in 2024.
The hedge fund said in a statement a client redeemed $7 billion during the third quarter. This meant its outflows totaled $5.5 billion, slightly higher than analyst expectations.
Man Group had flagged the redemption in July, which came in slightly higher due to increased performance.
The client decided to switch their entire equities allocation to a passively-managed, index-based portfolio, Man Group’s half year trading statement said.
Inflows aside from the redemption still tallied $1.5 billion for the third quarter, its latest statement showed.
The client redemption came out of a systematic long-only fund, among the better performers at Man Group, its statement showed.
Several of Man Group’s systematic funds which take only long bets, expecting assets to rise in price, returned over 5% on investment including Man’s Numeric Global Core fund which posted a 6.4% return for the three months ending Sept. 30.
Man Group’s AHL and GLG funds had mixed results for the quarter with its AHL Diversified fund down 8.9% and its GLG Global Credit Multi-strategy fund ending the quarter with a roughly positive 3% return.
“Overall, an in-line update for Man Group this morning, albeit we note strength in the relatively lower margin long-only segment, whereas the higher margin alternatives segment was below consensus expectations,” Investec analysts said in a note.
The largest hedge funds with over $5 billion of assets averaged 8.64% for the year so far and 1.24% for September, according to a report by hedge fund research firm PivotalPath on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Nell Mackenzie; Editing Dhara Ranasinghe and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)