Hedge fund stars make their clients pots of money, right? If only hedge fund investing was so simple. The truth is that managers with stellar reputations can have poor-performing investors. And the real stars are those who do well on metrics that the industry tends not to disclose.

Most investors look for a track record of decent annual investment gains when choosing a hedge fund manager. Take Greg Coffey, who recently retired from Moore Capital Management. On the industry’s conventional measure, he was a successful trader: annual returns of 22 per cent per annum on average from 2004 to 2012, helped in no small part by gains of 60 per cent in 2006.