What's in a Hedge Fund Name? Apparently Booze, Boats and Boston

(Bloomberg) -- Hedge funds don’t just cluster around the same stocks. They also find the same inspiration for the names of their firms, according to research by SumZero.

The investment network website used natural language processing and machine learning to analyze the names of more than five thousand hedge funds. Popular themes that popped up on their word chart included nautical terms, alcoholic drinks, and cities in New England.

SumZero is collecting the data as part of an effort to better understand the impact names have on performance and asset gathering.

After stripping out suffix language like “capital” and “management," the site concluded that "value," "street," "point," and "river" were among the most popular root names. On average, the length of a hedge fund name before the suffix was 1.6 words, making a moniker like “Value Street Capital” the archetype for a buy side firm.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brandon Kochkodin in New York at bkochkodin@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Arie Shapira at ashapira3@bloomberg.net, Joe Weisenthal at jweisenthal@bloomberg.net, Brad Olesen

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