Reuters – Hedge funds are crawling back to life after a turbulent 2008 that has almost halved their assets, and fewer but stronger survivors are set to regain their leverage to chase bargains in a less competitive environment.

Hedge funds, which manage their portfolios aggressively with various advanced strategies including derivatives to gain higher returns, suffered double-digit losses last year after global stocks and commodities tumbled because of the credit crisis.

As a result of client redemptions, the amount of investor capital managed by single-manager hedge funds might have halved to close to $1 trillion by mid-2009 from the 2008 peak of $2 trillion (1.2 trillion pounds), according to the European Central Bank.

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Tags: assets, bargains, competitive environment, credit-crisis, derivatives, global-stocks, hedge funds, investor capital, leverage, losses, portfolios, redemptions, reuters, stocks and commodities, survivors, trillion