Renaissance Technologies launched a new hedge fund in March. The fund is called the Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha Fund or RIDA for short and it is already up 3% in its first month and a half of trading. The new fund trades stocks, futures and forward contracts. This new fund is not benchmarked against anything so it would appear that its main objective is to generate absolute returns, which given Renaissance’s trade record are likely to be consistently high. But only time will tell.

According to Pensions&Investments Renaissance’s other funds are also doing quite well at the moment:

Renaissance already runs the $7 billion Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund and the $4 billion Renaissance Institutional Futures Fund, along with a third fund that is open only to the firm’s employees. The equities fund, known as RIEF, climbed 11% this year through April 13 and 35% last year, the person said.