Hedge Funds
Multi-strategy hiring slows to 7% as platforms shift capital to outside managers, Goldman says
External assets at multi-manager firms rose to $47bn from $34bn in a year, capacity Goldman likens to roughly 800 extra staff.
HedgeWeekly Hedge Fund Desk ·
Headcount at multi-strategy and multi-manager hedge funds grew 7% between mid-2025 and mid-2026, the slowest pace in at least four years, according to Goldman Sachs research reported by Business Insider and summarised by Hedgeweek and Traders Union. Growth had run at 27% in 2023, 18% in 2024 and 10% in 2025.
Goldman attributes part of the slowdown to external allocation programmes, under which platforms hand capital to independent managers, typically through separately managed accounts, instead of building more in-house teams. Millennium, Schonfeld and Qube have expanded such programmes, and Citadel, which has not traditionally allocated externally, has started to explore the model.
Assets placed with outside managers by multi-strategy firms climbed to $47bn from $34bn over the past 12 months, an increase Goldman equates to about 800 full-time staff. Counting that capacity would lift effective headcount growth above 10%, close to the prior year's rate. The average external ticket rose 19% to almost $190m, and investment professionals are expected to make up 43% of 2026 hiring, up from 40% in 2024, as firms rein in recruitment for support roles.
Why it matters: The figures suggest the multi-manager talent war is being fought with capital rather than only with guaranteed pay packages that reached tens of millions of dollars. For portfolio managers, platform SMAs offer a route to launch a firm without a long institutional fundraise; for allocators, they concentrate more of the industry's emerging-manager pipeline inside a handful of large platforms, which shapes both access to new talent and the terms on which it is offered.