Hedge Fund Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Mia Scarlett, Business & Capital Markets | Last updated: September 5, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Hedge funds reported $14.42 trillion in gross assets and $5.99 trillion in net assets as of December 31, 2025, on SEC Form PF — a gross-to-net ratio of 2.41x, the widest in the thirteen-year history of the series. Axis Intelligence Research finds that hedge funds account for 48.7% of all U.S. private fund gross assets while making up just 16.7% of the fund count.
Quick Answer
There were 9,858 hedge funds managed by 1,875 advisers filing SEC Form PF at year-end 2025, holding $14.42 trillion in gross asset value against $5.99 trillion in net asset value. Axis Intelligence Research estimates those funds carried roughly $41.5 trillion in gross notional exposure, and finds that relative value and macro strategies — 14.0% of strategy-reported capital — accounted for 60.3% of it.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that the hedge fund gross-to-net asset ratio reached 2.41x at December 31, 2025, up from 2.27x a year earlier and 1.83x in the first quarter of 2013, based on SEC Form PF Tables 2.1 and 2.3.
- Axis Intelligence Research estimates that strategy-classified qualifying hedge funds carried $41.5 trillion of gross notional exposure against $3.93 trillion of net assets at year-end 2025 — an implied 10.6x aggregate exposure multiple.
- The Axis Leverage Concentration Asymmetry (LCA) index stands at 4.32 for the fourth quarter of 2025, meaning relative value and macro strategies hold a share of industry gross notional exposure 4.32 times larger than their share of net assets; the reading has risen at every measurement point Axis Intelligence Research computed back to 2013.
- According to the Federal Reserve Board’s June 2026 FEDS Note, large hedge funds’ gross U.S. Treasury exposures reached $4.0 trillion as of September 2025, with repo cash borrowing at $3.0 trillion and the cash-futures basis trade at approximately $830 billion.
- The Office of Financial Research reported that hedge funds’ long cash Treasury holdings reached $2 trillion at year-end 2025, or a record 7% of marketable Treasury debt outstanding.
How Big Is the Hedge Fund Industry in 2026?
The largest single number in U.S. hedge fund data is not an assets-under-management figure at all. It is a balance-sheet total.
At December 31, 2025, funds classified as hedge funds on SEC Form PF reported $14,417 billion of gross asset value and $5,992 billion of net asset value. Gross assets grew 19.2% over the year; net assets grew 12.3%. The gap between those two growth rates is the whole story of 2025, and it is the reason a headline “$6 trillion industry” and a headline “$14 trillion industry” are both defensible descriptions of the same set of funds.
Hedge fund assets, 2013–2025
| Quarter end | Gross asset value ($B) | Net asset value ($B) | GAV/NAV | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-03-31 | 4,780 | 2,612 | 1.83 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
| 2019-12-31 | 8,181 | 4,136 | 1.98 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
| 2021-12-31 | 9,781 | 5,145 | 1.90 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
| 2022-12-31 | 9,381 | 4,832 | 1.94 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
| 2023-12-31 | 10,787 | 5,011 | 2.15 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
| 2024-12-31 | 12,094 | 5,337 | 2.27 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
| 2025-06-30 | 13,528 | 5,655 | 2.39 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
| 2025-12-31 | 14,417 | 5,992 | 2.41 | SEC Form PF Tables 2.1, 2.3 |
Ratios calculated by Axis Intelligence Research from the two SEC series. Retrieved September 5, 2026.
Across the whole private fund universe, 58,891 funds reported $29,631 billion of gross assets and $19,013 billion of net assets at year-end 2025. Hedge funds are 16.7% of the fund count and 48.7% of the gross assets. That asymmetry is not a market-share statement about capital raised — it is an arithmetic consequence of balance-sheet usage, and it separates hedge funds from every other private fund type in the SEC’s taxonomy.
Mia Scarlett: Strip the leverage out and the picture flattens considerably. Net assets grew 12.3% in a year when equity markets did most of the work; the segment revenue that actually moved was the gross line, up 19.2%. A credit analyst reading this filing would not describe 2025 as a year of exceptional fundraising. They would describe it as a year in which existing capital was worked harder.
Which Hedge Fund Strategies Use the Most Leverage?
Form PF asks large hedge fund advisers two separate leverage questions, and the difference between the answers is where the useful analysis lives.
The first is the ratio of gross assets to net assets — money actually borrowed and securities actually held. The second is gross notional exposure to net assets, which counts the face value of derivatives. For an equity long/short fund the two numbers are close. For a fixed income relative value fund they are not remotely close.
Leverage by strategy, qualifying hedge funds, Q4 2025
| Strategy | NAV ($B) | GAV/NAV | GNE/NAV | Implied GNE ($B) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equity | 1,592 | 1.9 | 4.9 | 7,800.8 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Other | 901 | 1.5 | 2.9 | 2,612.9 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Relative value | 338 | 9.7 | 42.4 | 14,331.2 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Credit | 293 | 1.8 | 3.5 | 1,025.5 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Multi-strategy | 261 | 3.3 | 12.0 | 3,132.0 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Event driven | 232 | 1.4 | 1.9 | 440.8 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Macro | 211 | 7.9 | 50.8 | 10,718.8 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Managed futures/CTA | 61 | 2.2 | 22.3 | 1,360.3 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Investment in other funds | 40 | 1.4 | 3.1 | 124.0 | SEC Form PF Tables 8.10, 8.13, 8.14 |
| Total | 3,929 | — | — | 41,546.3 | Axis Intelligence Research calculation |
NAV and both ratios are reported by the SEC. Implied gross notional exposure is calculated by Axis Intelligence Research as NAV × (GNE/NAV) for each strategy and summed. Retrieved September 5, 2026.
Equity is the largest strategy by capital and one of the least levered by notional. Macro is a twenty-fifth the size of the industry’s net assets and carries a notional multiple of 50.8x. Relative value sits at 42.4x on $338 billion of capital, and its capital base grew 69.8% during 2025 — the fastest of any strategy in the table.
Scope of the strategy table
The nine strategy rows sum to $3,929 billion of net assets. The SEC’s separate qualifying hedge fund NAV series (Table 2.4) reports $4,845 billion for the same quarter. The strategy classification therefore covers 81.1% of qualifying hedge fund capital. Axis Intelligence Research computes all strategy shares within the $3,929 billion reported base rather than grossing them up to the larger total, because the SEC does not publish a strategy allocation for the residual and any grossing-up would be an assumption presented as data.
The Axis Leverage Concentration Asymmetry (LCA) Index
LCA — Leverage Concentration Asymmetry — is a proprietary Axis Intelligence Research metric that answers one question: how far has a small slice of hedge fund capital pulled ahead of the rest in claim on the industry’s aggregate notional exposure?
Formula and inputs
For each of the nine Form PF strategies s:
Implied GNE_s = NAV_s × (GNE/NAV)_s
LCA = [ (GNE_RV + GNE_Macro) / Σ GNE_s ] ÷ [ (NAV_RV + NAV_Macro) / Σ NAV_s ]
All inputs come from SEC Form PF Tables 8.10 (strategy NAV) and 8.14 (NAV-weighted GNE/NAV by strategy). The weighting is the SEC’s own NAV weighting; Axis Intelligence Research applies no discretionary weights, no normalization and no smoothing. Relative value and macro are selected as the numerator because they are the two strategies whose reported GNE/NAV multiples exceed 40x — a threshold, not a judgment call.
At December 31, 2025: relative value and macro held $549 billion of the $3,929 billion strategy-reported NAV (14.0%) and $25,050 billion of the $41,546 billion implied notional exposure (60.3%). LCA = 60.3 ÷ 14.0 = 4.32.
LCA readings
| Quarter end | Implied aggregate GNE ($B) | RV + macro NAV share | RV + macro GNE share | LCA | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-03-31 | 14,220 | 18.8% | 55.8% | 2.98 | Axis Intelligence Research, from SEC Form PF |
| 2019-12-31 | 21,840 | 15.0% | 48.9% | 3.27 | Axis Intelligence Research, from SEC Form PF |
| 2022-12-31 | 23,940 | 12.1% | 43.6% | 3.60 | Axis Intelligence Research, from SEC Form PF |
| 2023-12-31 | 27,470 | 14.8% | 56.6% | 3.83 | Axis Intelligence Research, from SEC Form PF |
| 2024-12-31 | 32,640 | 11.3% | 43.0% | 3.82 | Axis Intelligence Research, from SEC Form PF |
| 2025-06-30 | 36,950 | 14.1% | 58.5% | 4.16 | Axis Intelligence Research, from SEC Form PF |
| 2025-12-31 | 41,550 | 14.0% | 60.3% | 4.32 | Axis Intelligence Research, from SEC Form PF |
The Q4 2025 reading is the baseline for ongoing quarterly publication. What LCA captures that a headline leverage average does not: the two component shares move independently. Between 2013 and 2022 the relative value and macro capital base shrank as a share of the industry while its notional share fell more slowly, and LCA rose anyway. Since 2023 both shares have risen together. The index is agnostic about which mechanism is operating; it reports the gap.
What LCA does not measure. It says nothing about risk. Notional exposure on a duration-hedged Treasury position is not comparable to notional exposure on an outright directional trade, and Form PF does not net across them. LCA is a positioning statistic, not a loss estimate. It also inherits the strategy table’s 81.1% coverage, and a fund is assigned to a single strategy only when more than half its assets sit there.
Mia Scarlett: The number that would reframe this quarter is the one the SEC does not publish — a haircut-weighted view of that $41.5 trillion. Absent it, the honest reading is narrower than the headline: 14% of the reported capital base now sits on the other side of a very large share of the industry’s contracts, and the concentration is rising, not oscillating.
How Much of the U.S. Treasury Market Do Hedge Funds Hold?
This is where the leverage in the strategy table becomes a public-policy number rather than an industry statistic.
The Federal Reserve Board’s June 2026 FEDS Note on hedge fund Treasury exposures decomposed large hedge funds’ Treasury positions using fund-level Form PF data. Gross Treasury exposures reached $4.0 trillion as of September 2025 — $2.4 trillion long, $1.6 trillion short — with repo cash borrowing of $3.0 trillion. Large hedge funds held about 8.5% of total privately held Treasuries by market value, up from about 4.5% at the start of 2023, and the fifty largest funds by gross Treasury exposure accounted for roughly 90% of the total, up from 84%.
What hedge funds do with $2.4 trillion of long Treasuries
| Use | Amount ($B) | Share of long exposure | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash-futures basis trade | 830 | 35% | Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, June 22, 2026 |
| Maturity-matched trades | 395 | 17% | Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, June 22, 2026 |
| Steepener-like trades | 375 | 16% | Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, June 22, 2026 |
| Swap spread arbitrage | 305 | 13% | Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, June 22, 2026 |
| Unencumbered cash holdings | 245 | 10% | Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, June 22, 2026 |
| Flattener-like trades | 175 | 7% | Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, June 22, 2026 |
| Long-only investment uses | 70 | 3% | Federal Reserve Board, FEDS Notes, June 22, 2026 |
Axis Intelligence Research calculates that the two explicitly leveraged arbitrage strategies — the basis trade and swap spread arbitrage — together represent 47.3% of long Treasury exposure.
The Office of Financial Research reached a compatible conclusion from a different construction. Its August 2026 analysis put hedge funds’ long cash Treasury holdings at $2 trillion at year-end 2025 — nearly three times the level five years earlier — against marketable Treasury debt outstanding of $28.9 trillion, which grew 29% over the same window. Hedge funds’ share of the cash Treasury market reached a record 7%. Short futures positions totalled $1.4 trillion.
Why the OFR’s 7% and the Fed’s 8.5% both stand
The two figures are close and they are not the same measurement. The OFR estimate subtracts long futures and futures-spread positions from Form PF long Treasury exposures and divides by total marketable debt at market value, as of December 2025. The Fed estimate uses the Banegas et al. physical-holdings method against privately held Treasuries, as of September 2025. Different numerator construction, different denominator, different quarter. Axis Intelligence Research publishes both rather than averaging them, because an average of two incompatible constructions is a number with no method behind it.
Mia Scarlett: The April 2025 episode is the part that belongs in every risk memo. About $60 billion of swap spread positions unwound in April and a further $40 billion in May, on the Fed’s decomposition — roughly a fifth of the book, in weeks, without a solvency event anywhere. Positions recovered to about $305 billion by September. The trade came back. The question a filing cannot answer is whether the funding did.
Who Invests in Private Funds?
The SEC publishes beneficial ownership for the private fund universe as a whole rather than for hedge funds separately, so the figures below describe all private funds, not hedge funds alone. They are still the most reliable public picture of who supplies the capital.
| Investor type | Value ($B) | Share of aggregate NAV | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private funds (fund-of-fund structures) | 4,032 | 21.2% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| Other | 3,618 | 19.0% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| State and municipal government pension plans | 2,274 | 12.0% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| U.S. individuals | 1,780 | 9.4% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| Non-profits | 1,615 | 8.5% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| Pension plans (non-governmental) | 1,476 | 7.8% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| Sovereign wealth funds and foreign official institutions | 1,422 | 7.5% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| Insurance companies | 953 | 5.0% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| Non-U.S. individuals | 545 | 2.9% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
| Remaining categories | 1,294 | 6.9% | SEC Form PF Tables 4.1, 4.2 |
As of December 31, 2025. Retrieved September 5, 2026.
Corporate pension plans have been the persistent loser here: 12.4% of private fund NAV in the first quarter of 2013, 7.8% at the end of 2025. Public pensions slipped from 13.1% to 12.0% over the same span. The capital that replaced them came from fund-of-fund structures and sovereign wealth.
How Concentrated Is the Hedge Fund Industry?
Fund counts have gone almost nowhere while assets have tripled.
There were 9,858 hedge funds on Form PF at year-end 2025 against 9,740 a year earlier and 7,498 in the first quarter of 2013 — a 31.5% increase in thirteen years, over which gross assets rose 201.6%. The adviser count tells the same story: 1,875 advisers reported hedge funds at year-end 2025.
Within that, the qualifying hedge funds — large funds run by large advisers, which file the detailed monthly data the Fed and OFR analyses depend on — numbered 2,178 across 637 advisers, and reported $12,580 billion of gross assets, or 87.3% of all hedge fund gross assets. Their own gross-to-net ratio was 2.60x, meaningfully above the 2.41x industry figure. The Federal Reserve independently estimates that qualifying hedge funds manage about 85% of aggregate Form PF hedge fund gross assets.
At the adviser level, 72 firms reported 100 or more private funds each at year-end 2025, up from 13 in the first quarter of 2013.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this article comes from a document fetched on September 5, 2026. The SEC series were retrieved as the machine-readable JSON files published alongside the Private Fund Statistics visualizations — the same data behind the SEC’s own charts, covering all quarters from 2013Q1 through 2025Q4. The Federal Reserve and OFR figures were read from the published notes.
Arithmetic. Every calculated figure was computed twice: once in floating-point and once using exact rational arithmetic (Python’s fractions.Fraction) as an independent control. The two passes agreed on every value published here.
Axis-calculated figures. Four classes of figure are Axis Intelligence Research constructions rather than SEC reports: gross-to-net ratios (GAV ÷ NAV from Tables 2.1–2.4); implied gross notional exposure by strategy (NAV_s × (GNE/NAV)_s from Tables 8.10 and 8.14); shares and growth rates derived from those; and the LCA index. Each carries axis_calculated = yes in the dataset with its formula in the method_note column.
Scope. Form PF captures SEC-registered advisers with at least $150 million in private fund assets under management. Smaller advisers, exempt reporting advisers and state-registered advisers do not file it, so the totals here are not the global hedge fund industry — they are the reported U.S. regulated universe. The strategy tables cover 81.1% of qualifying hedge fund NAV. Beneficial ownership is published for all private funds, not hedge funds alone, and is labelled as such throughout. Gross notional exposure is a face-value measure that does not net offsetting positions or adjust for duration.
What we declined to compute. We did not average the OFR and Federal Reserve estimates of hedge funds’ Treasury market share, because the two are built on different numerators, different denominators and different quarters; a blended figure would carry no reproducible method. We did not gross the strategy table up to the full qualifying hedge fund NAV, because the SEC publishes no strategy allocation for the unclassified residual.
About This Dataset
hedge-fund-statistics.csv contains 270 observations covering U.S. hedge fund assets, leverage, strategy composition, Treasury positioning and private fund beneficial ownership, spanning 2013Q1 through 2025Q4, with the fourth quarter of 2025 as the current reading. Every row carries its value, unit, as-of date, source organization, source document, source URL, retrieval date, a primary-source flag, an Axis-calculated flag and — where calculated — the formula used. Creator and publisher: Axis Intelligence Research.
License: CC BY 4.0. Free to use commercially with attribution.
Distribution: Hugging Face, Kaggle and GitHub, alongside this page.
Update policy: Relevance-driven. The dataset and the LCA reading are revised when the SEC publishes a new quarterly Private Fund Statistics release, when the Federal Reserve or OFR publishes a revised Treasury-exposure estimate, or when Form PF reporting changes alter the underlying series definitions.
Citation
APA — Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Hedge fund statistics: Assets, leverage and strategy data from SEC Form PF [Data set]. https://axis-intelligence.com/hedge-fund-statistics/
MLA — Axis Intelligence Research. Hedge Fund Statistics: Assets, Leverage and Strategy Data From SEC Form PF. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/hedge-fund-statistics/.
Chicago — Axis Intelligence Research. “Hedge Fund Statistics: Assets, Leverage and Strategy Data From SEC Form PF.” 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/hedge-fund-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do hedge fund asset totals differ so much between sources?
Because “assets” means at least three different things. Net asset value ($5.99 trillion at year-end 2025) is investor capital. Gross asset value ($14.42 trillion) adds borrowed money and the securities bought with it. Gross notional exposure — which Axis Intelligence Research estimates at roughly $41.5 trillion for strategy-classified qualifying funds — adds the face value of derivative contracts. A source quoting $6 trillion and a source quoting $14 trillion can both be citing SEC Form PF correctly.
What is a qualifying hedge fund, and why does the distinction matter?
A qualifying hedge fund is a large hedge fund managed by a large hedge fund adviser, which triggers the most detailed Form PF reporting — monthly exposure, leverage, counterparty and liquidity data. There were 2,178 of them at year-end 2025, holding 87.3% of all Form PF hedge fund gross assets. Nearly every leverage, strategy and Treasury statistic in circulation, including the Federal Reserve’s basis trade estimates, comes from this subset rather than the full 9,858-fund population.
Is a GNE/NAV multiple of 50.8x actually dangerous?
Not on its own, and treating it that way misreads the measure. Gross notional counts the face value of contracts without netting offsetting legs or adjusting for duration, so a macro fund running matched long and short rate positions can post a very large notional against modest directional risk. The figure that matters for stress is funding, not notional: how much of the position is financed overnight, and at what haircut. Form PF does not publish a haircut-weighted view, which is why regulators use it alongside repo data rather than instead of it.
Which hedge fund strategy grew fastest in 2025?
Relative value, by capital. Its net assets rose from $199 billion at year-end 2024 to $338 billion at year-end 2025, a 69.8% increase, while its gross notional multiple went from 29.3x to 42.4x. No other strategy in the Form PF table grew capital and leverage together at that rate.
How large is the Treasury basis trade right now?
The Federal Reserve Board estimated it at approximately $830 billion as of September 2025 — about 35% of hedge funds’ long Treasury exposure, and roughly double its early-2020 peak. Estimates from other institutions have ranged from $350 billion to $1.5 trillion depending on method, because hedge funds do not report cash Treasuries and derivatives separately on Form PF. Anyone citing a single basis trade figure should cite the method with it.
What happened to hedge fund Treasury positions during the April 2025 tariff turbulence?
About $60 billion of swap spread arbitrage positions — roughly 20% of the book — unwound in April 2025, with a further $40 billion in May, according to the Federal Reserve Board’s decomposition. Positions had recovered to about $305 billion by September 2025. The basis trade itself did not show a comparable unwind in the same window.
Does Form PF cover non-U.S. hedge funds?
Only indirectly. Form PF is filed by SEC-registered advisers with at least $150 million in private fund assets, which captures many offshore-domiciled funds run by U.S.-registered managers but excludes funds whose advisers have no SEC registration obligation. Treating the $14.42 trillion gross figure as a global industry total overstates the coverage.
Why has the hedge fund count barely moved while assets tripled?
Because growth has come from existing managers rather than new ones. The fund count rose 31.5% between the first quarter of 2013 and the fourth quarter of 2025 while gross assets rose 201.6%. Over the same period, the number of advisers reporting 100 or more private funds went from 13 to 72. Capital is consolidating into larger platforms with more vehicles each, not into more firms.
Are pension funds still the main source of hedge fund capital?
They are a shrinking source. Across all private funds, non-governmental pension plans supplied 7.8% of aggregate net asset value at year-end 2025, down from 12.4% in early 2013; state and municipal pension plans fell from 13.1% to 12.0%. Fund-of-fund structures (21.2%) and sovereign wealth funds and foreign official institutions (7.5%) took up the space. The SEC publishes this breakdown for all private funds rather than hedge funds specifically.