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Comment by mamonster | Hacker News Reader

>Somewhere out there is a person who’s spent years running a 4 Sharpe ratio at her $5 million friends-and-family hedge fund, or her Robinhood personal account, but she never gets a job at a big hedge fund.

Weird numbers to pick here. I know like 10 guys off my personal contact list who can do 4 Sharpe at 5 million easy. The "game" in hedge funds isn't 4 Sharpe at 5mio AUM, its 1.5-2 Sharpe at 1b AUM or 1 Sharpe at 10b AUM, both of which are infinitely harder than 4 Sharpe at 5mio AUM. You can do 4 Sharpe at 5mio AUM after 6 years at a BB in anything that's not equities or delta 1.

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> Weird numbers to pick here. I know like 10 guys off my personal contact list who can do 4 Sharpe at 5 million easy. The "game" in hedge funds isn't 4 Sharpe at 5mio AUM, its 1.5-2 Sharpe at 1b AUM or 1 Sharpe at 10b AUM, b

So how do they do that? I'm a lot closer to 5 million than than 10b...

> Weird numbers to pick here. I know like 10 guys off my personal contact list who can do 4 Sharpe at 5 million easy

Sure, but the pool of people who can get into hedge funds overlaps a ton with the pool of people who have done "6 years at a BB in anything that's not equities or delta". That's like... where hedge fund recruiters go poaching, isn't it?

I think the article was talking about random retail investors who can do this stuff, which seems relatively more rare.

These guys with 4.0 sharpe ratios at 5M AUM… are they running algos and if so at what time frame? I’m assuming building out the data / execution infra for that is expensive, not to mention the compute and storage power required to identify market inefficiencies after you have the infra built. You’re looking at a pretty significant upfront investment for that.

>You can do 4 Sharpe at 5mio AUM after 6 years at a BB in anything that's not equities or delta 1.

Can you explain for a non-finance audience?

Sharpe ratio is a metric that measures how much excess return an investment earns per unit of risk. So if someone says “this fund runs at a 4 Sharpe,” they mean the fund’s returns are four times the volatility, net of risk-free rate.

Super super ELI5 is that people don't like volatility in returns, even if the returns are good (i.e. down 40% one year, up 200% the next year is 34% CAGR, but crazy volatility). T-bills for example have extremely low volatility but also very low return. The holy grail is very low volatility with a great return. A 4 sharpe fund is in that quadrant.

Equities and "delta 1 assets" are very liquid, meaning there are a lot of buyers and sellers. This helps to make price discover more efficient. Anything outside of that means that there is much less liquidity and therefore inefficiencies in price.

Think about it this way. You are trying to sell an apple. In one room, there are 100 people trying to sell an apples and 100 people trying to buy them. In the other room there is 1 person trying to buy apples and no one selling. In the first room you don't have much leverage. The buyers can go to the other 99 sellers if they don't like your price. In the second room you have a ton of leverage. If the person wants to buy an apple they are either going to have to buy it from you or wait for another seller to enter the room.

When it comes to non equity or delta 1 assets, there tends to be more complexity in understanding the assets, which acts as a barrier to entry. If you have been in investment banking for 6+ years, you likely understand these complexities and can find pricing inefficiencies.

Sure, I'll give some numbers.

Sharpe ratio = (Your return annually - Annual Risk Free rate) / ( Annualized Vol of your portfolio).

BB = Bulge Bracket, basically a Tier 1 Bank (Goldman, UBS, MS, Citi, google the list).

Equities = Stocks.

Delta 1 = If underlying moves by X $, your product/ derivative moves by X $. Basically swaps, etfs, futures, etc.

Now for some numbers: Say you are under a "vanilla" 2/20 structure (which is actually like 10 years out of date but is still listed on all finance websites) where your fund charges a 2% management fee (i.e if you manage 5 mio USD you charge 100k per year for fund cost) and 20% performance rate on your gross above benchmark ( so you take 20% of the return above your benchmark).

Annualized SP500 vol is let's say 18%, your cash return right now is 3.5%. Quick maths gets you to 4 Sharpe is about 75% yearly return. ((75-3.5)/18 is about 4).Under these assumptions, 4 Sharpe return on 5 mio is 3.750mio.

Your performance fee as a HF manager is gonna be 0.715(75%-3.5%) x 0.2 x 5mio = 715k. So 4 Sharpe on 5mio is basically you earning 900k-1mio USD (depends on the jurisdiction for your base, i took like 180k USD for base) as the HF manager.

Edit: For people who don't trade professionally, capacity (i.e how much money your strategy/you as a trader accept before becoming inefficient/losing money) is the big filter. There's a shitload of strats that work at 1 mio USD but completely stop at 2mio or 5mio.

I think people were asking you to explain what kind of strategies people run at sharpe 4

From people I know personally:

"Arbs" on stuff that big desks don't touch because of capacity (small mergers for example, you lever up on 2-3 small merger arbs per year and you are almost there);

DEX to liquidity pool latency arbs for shitcoins if you want a crypto example;

Pure arbs (One of my friends who admittedly is not satisfied with 1mio USD comp did this trade: https://notion.moontowermeta.com/financial-hacking-etf-vs-ne... ).

Edit: The other option is that if you are a trader in "special" markets (the best example is biotech/medstocks) where domain knowledge really matters being 4 sharpe is basically 1 good trade a year, and at 5mio USD AUM you are always at capacity.

I wonder why people always assume that the strategy would be algorithmic or systematic. How about global macro, long/short equity, or even plain long only done well ? Actually studying markets and assets fundamentally, and finding asymmetric bets ? There are plenty of people that have done that successfully over really long periods of time, I doubt markets are perfectly efficient just because some academics claim so, especially for bets with strong convexity.

The WSB community most likely obliterates that metric, and I mean the broader community not the regards buying lotto tickets. You don’t need to look at Hedge Funds for good trading, you need to look at them for insider trading knowledge. IMHO that’s all they have on others because the only data that’s not available is that … inside stuff.

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