The World’s Best Hedge Fund Returns Are in Singapore

In 2019, two of the ten best performing hedge funds in the world were run out of Singapore. We asked why at the time and offered three theories. With seven more years of data, a fourth explanation now looks considerably stronger than any of them.

What we reported in 2019

Vanda Global Fund, a small Singapore manager, was the best performing hedge fund of 2019 with returns above 300%. Quantedge Capital, then managing $2.1bn, returned 63.1% and was rated one of the best quant funds in the world. Singapore averaged 9.4% for clients across the year, ahead of every other major region.

Singapore's combined hedge fund AUM at the time was around $47.3bn against North America's $1.6tn, which was what made the result so striking and prompted the original question.

The three theories we offered, revisited

Theory 1: Singapore managers are bigger risk takers. This one has held up, and it turns out to have been the whole story rather than one of three. Vanda ran annualised volatility of 72%, having returned 260% in 2017 and then lost 49% in 2018. Quantedge targeted annualised volatility of around 30%, far above what most institutional investors will accept. Vanda's own founder told clients at the time not to expect 2019 to repeat.

Theory 2: Constraints forced global thinking. Plausible as a cultural observation, but it does not survive contact with the data. If a shallow domestic market and a rigorous education system produced systematically better managers, the effect would show up consistently across the Singapore cohort rather than in two outliers in one year. It did not.

Theory 3: Singapore was working with less risk. This was the weakest of the three and is now clearly wrong. It confused a smaller asset base with a lower risk appetite. The opposite was true: A smaller, largely non-institutional client base is precisely what allowed those managers to run volatility that a pension fund would never tolerate.

What happened next

The test arrived within three months. In March 2020, Quantedge fell 29%, the worst month in its history, immediately after finishing 2019 up 70.5%. The same risk appetite that produced the headline year produced the drawdown.

That is the single most useful data point in this entire story, and it is why a returns-only league table is close to useless to an allocator. The 2019 winner and the March 2020 loser were the same fund, and nothing in a ranking by annual return would have told you that was coming.

Where Singapore stands in 2026

The interesting development is that the durable story turned out to be about compounding rather than the 2019 spike.

Quantedge marked its twentieth anniversary having grown from a $3m launch to roughly $6bn in assets, one of Singapore's largest home-grown managers. It has averaged around 19% a year net since 2006, finished 2024 up 31%, and started 2026 with a 10% January. That record was built on tolerating volatility consistently over two decades, not on catching one exceptional year.

The wider region has also strengthened. The HFRI Asia with Japan Index rose 12.1% in 2024, its best annual figure since 2009, driven by positions in China, Japan and artificial intelligence. Singapore's FengHe Fund Management returned 27% net in 2025 and roughly tripled its assets from $4bn at the end of 2024, with several large Asian equity managers posting very strong first-half 2026 numbers. Hong Kong's Aspex Management gained 26% in 2025.

Asia is no longer an outlier story. It is a genuine allocation question, which makes getting the analysis right considerably more important than it was in 2019.

How to actually compare regional hedge fund performance

If you are assessing managers in this region, a headline return figure is the least informative number available. Four adjustments do most of the work.

• Normalise for volatility. A 63% return at 30% volatility and a 12% return at 5% volatility are not the same achievement. Comparing Sharpe, Sortino and Calmar ratios across the cohort reorders the table substantially.
• Compare like with like. Singapore's 2019 leaders were leveraged global macro funds. Ranking them against regional long/short equity managers measures strategy selection, not skill. Peer groups have to be built on strategy and risk profile before geography.
• Look at the drawdown, not just the return. Maximum drawdown, recovery period and downside deviation tell you whether a track record is investable at institutional size. Vanda's 260% and subsequent 49% loss is one number in a ranking and a different conversation entirely in a risk report.
• Correct for survivorship. Regional averages are calculated from funds that still exist. Singapore's AUM sat below its 2017 peak even during the 2019 celebration, and plenty of managers had already closed. Any regional average that ignores the failures overstates the region.

None of this requires a view on whether Singapore is a better place to run money. It requires a peer group you have defined yourself, on risk-adjusted terms, across a database wide enough to include the funds that did not make the headlines.

Frequently asked questions