The fifth AIMA and Marex emerging manager survey came out this week. 180 managers, 50 allocators, and a headline the industry is already repeating back to itself: an encouraging picture, appetite rising. The report uses the word “encouraging,” and it is not wrong to.
I read the same 42 pages and came away with a different sentence. Getting in front of an allocator got easier this year. Deserving the money got more operational and more expensive, and the channel that used to carry your raise is being swapped out underneath you. One got easier. The other got harder. Take only the headline, and you will spend the next year working on the half that already sorted itself out.
Take the findings one at a time.
Allocators will look at you sooner
The average track record an allocator says they need fell from 1.52 years to 1.27. Almost three in five investors, 58%, now say they will look at a fund with a year or less of history. The average smallest fund a plan will consider dropped again, from $106m in 2024 to roughly $94m, close to a third lower than the $151m of 2022. Time from first meeting to allocation eased from eight months to seven and a half.
Take the win. It is a real loosening, and it is the clearest good news in the report. A shorter track record is no longer the wall it was. I have argued the number was never what allocators were really buying, so if you have been sitting out of the market waiting to clear some imagined three-year bar, the data says stop waiting.
But a meeting is not an allocation, and the survey is blunt about what stands between them.
What gets you rejected moved to your least favourite part of the business
Operational due diligence is the number one reason allocators pass, at 86%, up from 83%. Fear of investment style drift jumped from 72% to 84%. “Unrealistic targets or poor business plan” rose from 66% to 80%. Fees, the thing managers agonise over, sit well down the list.
Read those three together. The reasons allocators say no have moved off your numbers and onto your operation: whether it is real, and whether there is a business under the strategy. I covered where the capital raise actually leaks already, so I will not repeat it here. The point today is smaller. The survey says it in the allocators’ own answers: rejection is hardening around your operations, the part of the job you find most boring, at the same moment the track-record bar gives way.
That is the trade the headline hides. They lowered the requirement you were ready for and raised the one you have been avoiding.
Looking institutional early is a cost you carry before the money arrives
Clearing that operational bar costs money, and the survey shows the bill rising. It frames earlier institutionalisation as maturity, and points to average breakeven AUM climbing about a fifth, to $82.9m. The smaller managers are hiring sooner and building operations sooner, at an AUM that does not yet pay for it.
The report calls this maturity. From your side of the desk it is overhead. You are being asked to look like an institution before you can afford to run like one. Headcount at the smallest firms crept up. Their cost of running, as a share of assets, sits above the wider field. None of it is optional any more, because the 86% above says the allocators are checking. So you carry an institutional cost structure through the exact stage where you can least afford it, on the promise that it is what earns the next allocation. That promise is probably true. It is also expensive, and the survey is cheerful about it in a way you cannot be.
How capital finds you is being rewired
Say you carry the cost and clear the diligence. There is still the question of how an allocator finds you at all, and this is the finding almost no one is quoting.
The share of allocators sourcing new managers through personal networks collapsed from 65% to 40% in two years. Over the same period, capital introduction through a prime broker rose from 22% to 30%. The warm intro, the someone-who-knows-someone that has carried first-time raises for decades, is thinning as a channel. The institutional pipe is taking its place.
For a solo manager, that rewires the plan. If your plan to raise has always been “work my network,” the survey is telling you the network is doing less of the work than it did, and the channel replacing it is one you may not be plugged into. Family offices are the partial exception, still leaning slightly more on personal networks than the rest, 43% against 38%. For everyone else, being findable now means being inside the prime broker capital introduction machine, or building a way in that does not depend on who you happen to know already. That is a strategic question, not an admin one, and it is the first one I would ask if I launched today.
You are buying something your investor did not order
There is one more place managers are spending to look modern, and the survey says the buyer did not ask for it. Two-thirds of managers now use generative AI at least in the front office, and 42% run it across the whole business. Only 8% of allocators say they expect a manager to use AI at all, and 34% say plainly that they judge you on pedigree and opportunity, not on your tech stack.
So the buyers did not ask for it, and a third will look straight past it. That does not make AI a waste. I have argued before for automating the raise rather than the alpha, and I stand behind every word. It means the burden is entirely on you to show the tool bought you something real, especially if it shows up in your fee. They buy results. Whether you used AI to get there does not come up. Do not confuse the two because the headlines did.
The actual state of play
The report’s word is “encouraging.” Mine is “repriced.” Both are true, which is why the headline is so easy to misread.
One of the survey’s own respondents put it in a single line: “Managing the money is the easy part. Raising the money is still the hard part.” Everything above is why that is still true.
Appetite is up. The door is more open than it was two years ago. And in the same breath, the survey says the reasons you get rejected have shifted to operations, and the channel that used to carry your raise is quietly being swapped out underneath you. Easier to get the meeting. Harder to be the kind of manager who keeps the money once it arrives.
If you read the survey this week and felt relief, read it again with a pen. The good news is real. The bill is in the parts nobody is quoting.
Which of these four did your fund run into this year? Reply and tell me.
Next week I am doing something new for this newsletter: handing half of it to someone else. Melanie Goodman and I are taking on the question this survey leaves wide open. If the warm intro is fading, how does serious capital actually find you now? The short answer is that the people who will decide your fund’s future are already watching you, and they will not tell you they are there. Why the smart money lurks, and what it is deciding about you while it does, next Thursday.
Cláudia
FAQ
What did the 2026 AIMA & Marex emerging manager survey find?
The fifth survey polled 180 managers and 50 allocators, and the headline is rising appetite. Allocators will look at shorter track records and smaller funds than they would two years ago. The catch sits underneath. The reasons they say no have moved to operations and cost, and the channel that used to carry first-time raises is being swapped out.
What track record do allocators require for emerging hedge funds in 2026?
Less than they did. The average track record allocators say they need fell from 1.52 years to 1.27, and 58% now say they will look at a fund with a year or less of history. The smallest fund a plan will consider also dropped, to roughly $94m from $106m in 2024.
Why do allocators reject emerging managers?
Operational due diligence is the number one reason, cited by 86% and up from 83%. Fear of style drift rose to 84%, and “unrealistic targets or poor business plan” to 80%. Fees, the thing managers agonise over, sit well down the list.
How do allocators find new managers now?
Through the prime broker, increasingly. Allocators sourcing managers through personal networks fell from 65% to 40% in two years, while capital introduction through a prime broker rose from 22% to 30%. Family offices still lean slightly more on networks, 43% against 38%, but for everyone else the warm intro is thinning as a channel.
How much does it cost to run an emerging fund now?
More than the assets support at launch. The survey puts average breakeven AUM up about a fifth, at $82.9m, with the smallest firms hiring and building operations sooner than that number pays for. You carry an institutional cost structure through the stage where you can least afford it.
Cláudia Quintela is the founder of Vibe Advisors, an independent advisory boutique helping emerging hedge fund managers raise institutional capital. Twenty-five years across State Street, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Blenheim Capital. MSc Finance, LSE. CFA charterholder. Based in London.