These hedge funds crushed it in April — and a key Liberation Day lesson helped them

• April was a massive bounce-back for global markets, with stocks hitting all-time highs.
• Hedge funds across the board had strong Aprils; Hedge Fund Research states it was the best month since 2020.
• Funds such as Tiger Global, CastleKnight Management, Light Street, and more surged.

Claims of historic performance are often exaggerated on Wall Street. But April was one for the record books.

The sharp rebound across global markets pushed stocks to all-time highs, with the S&P 500 rising more than 10% in April. Hedge Fund Research called it a “historic gain” for the industry, with the average fund up 4.8% — the second-best monthly return since 2009, behind only November 2020.

And still there were funds that stood out for their eye-popping performance.

Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global, the long-running stockpicking firm, was up 15% in its flagship hedge fund strategy, putting it at roughly 3% for the year, a person close to the New York-based firm told Business Insider. Another of the firm’s growth-stock-obsessed peers, Glen Kacher’s Light Street Capital, returned 18.2% in April, pushing its 2026 returns to 11.3%.

But it wasn’t just stockpickers focused on US tech companies that dominated.

CastleKnight Management, the $3.6 billion event-driven fund run by billionaire David Tepper’s nephew, Aaron Weitman, was up 21.2% last month and has made 26.9% on the year. Kenneth Tropin’s Graham Capital, which manages $21.6 billion in assets, made 6.6% in its Tactical Trend strategy and 4.2% in its Quant Macro offering in April; those two strategies are now up 20.5% and 11.1%, respectively, in 2026.

Emerging-markets-focused manager Carrhae Capital, a London-based firm run by former SAC trader Ali Akay, was up 10% on the month through April 24 in the firm’s long-short strategy. It pushed the strategy’s year-to-date gains into black, with returns of 5.5%, HSBC’s Hedge Weekly stated.

In Hong Kong, another former investor for Point72 founder Steve Cohen, Angus Wai, has his Asia-focused multimanager firm firing on all cylinders. A person close to Polymer Capital, which runs fundamental and quant strategies, said the firm was up more than 7% in April and more than 15% on the year. The managers mentioned declined to comment.

Liberation Day lessons pay off

Several factors contributed to the stellar month for hedge funds. The commodity shocks and inflation fears in March stemming from the US-Iran war eased in light of ceasefire discussions, however tenuous.

AI and technology stocks also staged a comeback, ripping late in the month after robust earnings from hyperscalers Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft.

“For most funds, April was less about embracing a benign macro regime and more about monetizing crisis hedges, covering shorts, and deciding how quickly to rebuild equity risk into a tape moving faster than most risk frameworks anticipated,” industry research firm PivotalPath said in a research report.

A common theme among outperformers was holding on to core positions during the chaos in March. One prime broker told Business Insider that client activity was more muted, focused on hedging rather than selling longs and cutting shorts, a contrast with the Liberation Day tariff mayhem a year ago.

That tactical adjustment was rewarded, PivotalPath noted, as the managers “who recovered fastest had maintained high-conviction core longs beneath index-level hedges through March and when ceasefire headlines improved the risk tone, they did not need to rebuild from cash.”