Soros Leads Pack Of Top Earning Hedge Fund Managers

by Phillip Morton, Investors Offshore.com

23 July 2004

George Soros returned to the top of the hedge fund tree in 2003 as the year’s top earning fund manager; and average take home pay for the industry’s top 25 managers doubled to over $200 million.

According to the estimates of Institutional Investor magazine’s hedge fund offshoot ‘Alpha’, investment guru turned philanthropist Soros earned an astonishing $750 million last year at his New York-based hedge fund Soros Fund Management.

Absent from Alpha’s list in 2002, the sum returns Soros to the number one spot by some margin in a year when fund manager earnings rocketed.

Placed second and third on the list were David Tepper of Appaloosa Management and James Simons of Renaissance Technologies Corp who earned $510 million and $500 million respectively. All of the top seventeen managers on the list earned more than $100 million, with the lowest ranked manager taking home what seems a comparitively trifling sum of $65 million.

The average pay for the top 25 fund managers was $207 million in 2003, almost double the average $110 million income in 2002.

As fund manager pay is often a closely guarded secret by most players in the industry, Alpha based its estimation on two factors: share of fees generated by the funds they managed and gains made on the managers’ own capital placed in the fund, based on publicly available resources.

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