Renaissance Technologies has moved ahead and launched a new hedge fund, a move we reported back in October that the firm was considering.
The East Setauket, New York–based, quantitatively focused firm founded by math whiz James Simons recently raised $1.5 billion for the Renaissance Institutional Diversified Global Equities (RIDGE) fund. It began trading on April 1.
As we had earlier indicated, Ridge is a market-neutral fund. This means RIDGE was designed to have a low correlation to the global equities market. It will trade more than 4,000 equity securities listed on U.S. and non-U.S. exchanges.
With this fund Renaissance is back to offering investors three funds.
The other two are the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF) and the Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha Fund (RIDA).
The firm’s legendary Medallion Fund has been closed to outside investors for more than a decade. However, it is widely accepted as the best-performing hedge fund of all time.
The firm also operates the Renaissance Kaleidoscope Fund, a fund of Renaissance funds offered only to employee-related investors. It now invests in Medallion, RIEF and RIDA. Last fall Renaissance announced it was shutting down its Renaissance Institutional Futures Fund (RIFF).
Renaissance’s two existing funds offered to outsiders were by far among the top-performing hedge funds last year. RIEF surged 16.5 percent, while RIDA rose 15.6 percent.
And this year has been no different. In the first quarter RIEF gained 12.7 percent after climbing about 2 percent in March. RIDA rose 9 percent for the quarter despite falling by 1 percent in March.
RIEF — a long-biased strategy — uses computer programs to trade U.S. and non-U.S. equity securities listed on U.S. exchanges. The fund was designed to generate gross annual returns of 400 to 600 basis points above the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index over rolling three- to five-year periods. RIEF has compounded at about 11 percent since its August 2015 launch.
RIDA, launched in March 2012, trades global futures and forwards, and U.S. and non-U.S. equities listed on U.S. exchanges.
