What Is AQR Capital Management? Is It A Hedge Fund?

AQR is an Investment Management company founded in 1998. It offers services related to investment and uses a research-driven approach to work on new strategies to offer considerable returns to its client. The AQR’s foundation was laid in 1998 when it started to offer investment advisory and registered with the SEC USA. AQR has different verticals, such as AQR holdings, AQR groups, and AMG( Affiliated Management Group). But it is publicly traded as an AQR Capital Management group. 

What Does AQR Specialize In?

AQR Capital Management offers most of the services related to the Quantitative Investment advisory, which consists of understanding the different factors like valuation, momentum, and proprietary models and applying them systematically. Some of its client’s basic features are investment advice based on tailor-made strategies. 

Whom Does AQR Offers Its Services To?

AQR Capital Management has various clients, out of which a significant percentage are institutional clients, including charitable organizations, government entities, foreign official institutions, and various other corporate entities. Also, a few Funds, such as AQR Funds, AQR UCITS, and Sponsored funds, are part of its client base. 

Where Does AQR Invest Money, And What Strategies Does It Use?

Investment Vehicles

AQR Capital Management strategies are widely used in various investment vehicles such as model portfolios, mutual funds, and offshore partnership companies. A lot of its strategies are designed in such a way that it helps taxable investors to save their funds and pay the optimum tax.

ESG

The main goal of AQR Capital Management is to help its client to achieve various Social, Governance, and Environmental Goals. With the help of ESG, the AQR Funds try to optimize the return vs. risk trade-off for different clients’ investments.

Different Alternatives

It also diversifies its portfolio by investing in different asset classes. With the help of various alternative strategies, they gain a good amount of returns in both bull and bear markets. In some cases, the absolute return strategies have zero or minimal exposure to the traditional markets.

Fixed Income

AQR Capital Management aims to perform consistently by applying different investment themes for different securities. With the help of multi-factor investment strategies and utilizing the fundamental growth drivers, they aim to offer huge returns, which are not correlated with fixed income Managers or the different asset classes.

Equities

AQR utilizes a risk-controlled framework to invest in highly repeatable and compelling investments driven through different regions. Also, they ally systematic research to cater to their customers’ financial and investment needs.

Fee By AQR Hedge Fund

AQR Capital Management charges a significant percentage to offer different clients hedge funds and investment advisories. As per the official website, the AQR funds charges fees from 0.25 percent to 1.75 percent. For programs like AQR UCITS, it’s around 0.10 percent to 1.50 percent, and often, it charges 25 percent of the total profits. 

For institutional clients such as sponsored funds, they charge 2.55 of AUM and 30 percent of the total profits. Distinct managed accounts are subject to a different category of asset-based fees that are 1 percent.

Primary Strategies That AQR Hedge Fund Uses

AQR Capital Management has developed various models that help to understand the return from the basket of stocks and long-term risks. When they choose any Stock, they try to measure them on the metrics of three different factors discussed above. Based on which every stock is given a score, that helps to decide to take a long or short.

If any stock is of less score, they are short, whereas a stock with a high score is long. This simplifies the process, which depends upon various factors like regions, sectors, cross markets, and exposure. In a nutshell, the fund always tries to make a positive return by providing a balanced exposure to the market without any risk exposure. 

Of the several elements mentioned above, value is the most crucial. Based on the value, it is concluded that the tendency of stocks with low prices has a good chance of outperforming the expensive stocks. AQR has generated a tremendous return based on the Value factor. For example, The MSCI World Value Index has offered a return of 14.5 percent, whereas, for the same duration, the MSCI World Index has offered 22.3 percent gains.

Some Quantitative factors Funds like AQR Equity Market Neutral tries to diversify the risk based on various factors. Also, they don’t depend upon any one group or the signal instead, they use uncorrelated signals that offer diversified and risk-adjusted returns. Its market-neutral nature allows AQR to enhance returns further by leveraging its portfolio up to 5x. 

AQR Hedge Fund Performance

Since the inception of AQR Capital Management in 2022, the QMNIX or the EQuity Market Netruel has offered a return of 2.1 percent annually. As discussed before, AQR uses a quantitative approach that highly considers the different factors like quality, value, and momentum. All these three are the primary factors helpful in understanding the security-specific features of any Corporate and its profit. 

In the recent few years, the AQR performance seemed to be steady. In 2016, Value Signal led a huge return 2016, but it also faced losses in 2017. Lately, they had a strong return from several other factors that nullified most of the loss in the two years. But this was not the same for the year 2019 and further. The stock values had hit quite bad levels, which led the firm to face huge losses without any chance of recovering them. 

Out of all the losses, the value’s effect was quite hurtful. In 2019, the Value divergence was so extreme that hed led AQR hedge fund to reconsider its strategies. The cofounder had published a whitepaper explaining the situation and changing the AQR Capital Management value’s weight to 10 percent and the Equity Market Neutral Model to 33 percent of the risk budget. Subsequently, it further increased the weight during the year 2021. 

AQR Hedge Fund Performance in 2022

In the year 2022, they published a performance report that says that the $124 billion AQR Management firm had good returns in 2021 and record-breaking performance during Q1 2022. The net return from their strategies was over 10.4 percent and a maximum of 15.4 percent. Some of the alternative strategies of AQR Capital Management had given a huge return as given below.

Delphi Long short Equity Strategy	33.2 percent
Sustainable long-short equity Fund	10.2 percent
Equity market neutral fund	17.6 percent

Summary On What Is AQR

AQR is an Investment Management company founded in 1998. It works like a hedge fund that  Uses a research-driven approach to work on new strategies to offer considerable returns to its client. The main goal of AQR Capital Management is to help its client achieve various Social, Governance, and Environmental Goals. AQR charges a significant percentage to offer different clients hedge funds and investment advisories. AQR uses a quantitative approach that highly considers factors like quality, value, and momentum.

The fund always tries to make a positive return by providing a balanced exposure to the market without any risk exposure. AQR hedge fund faced losses in the year 2019 and further. The stock values had hit quite bad levels, which led the firm to face huge losses. In 2022, they published a performance report that says the $124 billion AQR Management firm had good returns.