British hedge fund manager Chris Hohn’s investments in GE Aerospace, Airbus and Safran paid off handsomely in 2025.
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Most of the world’s best hedge funds have advanced quantitative models and deep investing teams across several asset classes, but in another standout year for old-fashioned stock investing, none fared better than British billionaire Chris Hohn.
His TCI Fund Management earned an estimated $18.9 billion in net gains for investors last year, the largest single-year gain on record for a hedge fund, according to Edmond de Rothschild’s annual report ranking the world’s top 20 hedge funds. The London-based fund, which has $77 billion in assets under management, has earned $40 billion in gains in just the last three years thanks to the roaring stock market and generated a reported net return of 27% last year. Forbes now estimates that Hohn’s personal fortune is worth $11.8 billion, up from $9.2 billion a year ago.
TCI has a concentrated stock portfolio in just a handful of stocks—its latest quarterly SEC filing reported $52.7 billion divided among nine U.S. listed equities, including GE Aerospace, Microsoft, Visa, Moody’s and S&P Global. GE Aerospace, the main offshoot of General Electric after it spun off its healthcare and energy businesses in 2022, was TCI’s largest single position as of the end of September, worth $14.2 billion. Its stock gained 85% in 2025. TCI is also an investor in European aerospace stocks Airbus and Safran, which both rose more than 40% last year.
The firm’s latest annual report as of March 31, 2025 says that it paid an $82 million dividend to its parent company controlled by Hohn for the prior year and donated $797 million to charity, including $637 million to The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. The charity is the hedge fund’s namesake, founded and chaired by Hohn, and primarily supports climate causes, children’s health and reproductive rights.
With $68.4 billion in net gains since its inception in 2004, TCI moved to fifth on this year’s Edmond de Rothschild rankings, which have been released every year since 2010. The list is produced by Rick Sopher, a senior advisor at Edmond de Rothschild and former chairman of LCH Investments, an Edmond de Rothschild subsidiary that was the world’s oldest fund of hedge funds. It returned 10.0% annually from its launch in 1969 until it closed last year.
Sopher’s research found that the top 20 managers collectively generated $115.8 billion in gains last year, part of a record $543 billion for the full hedge fund industry.
“A combination of record high assets under management, strong equity and bond markets, and sizable macro trading opportunities all contributed to this strong performance,” Sopher said in a press release.
Ken Griffin’s Citadel remains the most profitable hedge fund of all time, according to the list, tacking on $7.4 billion in gains last year to reach $90.4 billion since it was launched in 1990. Its flagship Wellington fund returned only 10.2% net of fees last year, its worst year since 2018, which trailed the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index’s 12.6% return representing the average hedge fund and the S&P 500 Index’s 17.9% for passive stock investors. Still, Citadel can boast a 19.2% annualized net return since 1990 that crushes the S&P 500 by more than eight percentage points.
D.E. Shaw and Bridgewater, the two biggest winners of 2025 other than TCI, are second and third on the all-time list, respectively. Bridgewater’s flagship Pure Alpha fund produced an impressive 34% return in 2025, helping the firm record an estimated $15.6 billion in gains. With founder Ray Dalio fully retired and off of Bridgewater’s board, the firm is led by CEO Nir Bar Dea and co-CIOs Bob Prince, Greg Jensen and Karen Karniol-Tambour. D.E. Shaw posted an 18.5% return in its multi-strategy Composite Fund and 28.2% in its macro-focused Oculus Fund to earn an estimated $12.7 billion in investing gains last year.
Collectively, the top 20 firms have generated $970 billion in gains since inception, making it a hard list for up-and-coming firms to crack without a lengthy track record. The same 20 hedge funds on the list last year made this year’s list, with none moving up or down more than two spots. All 20 were founded before 2005, and TCI is the only one in the top 15 with an inception date after 2000.
But that doesn’t mean the stodgy industry is out of vogue, even as it continues to lag behind the bull market in stocks. Hedge Fund Research data found that hedge funds worldwide attracted $71 billion in inflows in the first three quarters of 2025, an 11-year high, to boost their assets under management to $4.98 trillion. These gains come as other alternative assets like private equity have struggled to raise new funds. With stock investors anxious over nosebleed valuations, hedge funds will next be judged over how much protection they provide whenever the music stops.
