Last year was a tough one for hedge funds.
A recent Citi survey found hedge fund profits down for the year about $10 billion dollars – or 30 percent – from the year prior, and indexes from research firms eVestment and Preqin put hedge fund returns up around 3 percent – just a fraction of the S&P 500's 13.7 percent return.
But there were of course some winners.
Here are some common traits that last year's top performing funds shared, courtesy of Preqin's 2015 Global Hedge Fund Report:
Their core strategies were probably equity strategies.
Of the top 20 performers, 75 percent used equity strategies. Of the top 10, equity strategy funds had a higher median return (59 percent) than any other type.
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