Just in case you might happen to encounter a drawdown one day, I recommend you keep expenses low enough so your business can survive on the annual fees alone (i.e. the "2" part of 2-and-20). You
might hit a period where you're below the HWM for 9 or 12 consecutive months, and not earning profit incentives (the "20" part of 2-and-20) at all. It may not have ever happened in historical testing, but it
might happen in the unpredictable and capricious future. Wouldn't it be a shame if you lost your business because of a plain old drawdown?
It's a fairly simple calculation. Tote up your fixed costs, the expenses you've gotta pay no matter what. Divide by your
pool-wide average annual fees (which will be less than 2% because you will give discounts to
some investors) and that's the minimum AUM to meet your nut.
For example, these might be a CPO's fixed costs. You'll notice that I omitted office rental costs(!):
- Annual Audit: $8000
Annual NFA membership: $1000
Accounting statements: $9600 ($800/month)
Legal, for D-Doc updates: $1000
Data feed: $3600 ($300/month)
Tax prep and K1s: $4500
CPO (your) salary+incometax+SocialSecurity: $48000 ($4000/month)
The grand total is $75,700 per year.
Assume in this example that half of the CPO's AUM pays 2% annual fees and the other half negotiated a discount, to pay 1%. The pool-wide average annual fees are 1.5%. So this example CPO would need 75700 / 0.015 = $5.05 million under management, to break even, when below the High Water Mark and not receiving profit incentive income.