The group of funds named after Kevin O'Leary, the CBC dragon, had a rough go in 2011, seeing about $500-million in redemptions.
That figure was calculated by Mark McQueen at Wellington Financial, who dug through the year-end financials and posted the findings on his blog.
By his count, O'Leary funds had $498-million of redemptions in 2011, amounting approximately 24 per cent of the funds under management.
The funds that saw the worst redemptions with the Convertible Portfolio Trust ($99.9-million) and the U.S. Portfolio Trust ($54.1-million).
To get a sense of what these redemptions did to total fund sizes, the Convertible Portfolio Trust launched last year with a $266-million. $100-million of that had been redeemed by year-end.
The Strategic Yield Plus fund, another one that had rough redemptions, had net assets worth $115-million at the start of the year. By Dec. 31, that value fell to $61-million.
Update: To clarify, these redemptions are total gross redemptions, not net, so they don't account for new money going in. Regardless, they demonstrate something few investors knew: a lot of investors are unhappy.
Editor's note: In a subsequent article, Kevin O'Leary said the $500-million figure is incorrect. The correct figure is $253-million.
Tim Kiladze