A measure of investors' desire to draw money out of hedge funds showed an uptick in May from April.

More investors in May indicated they want to pull some of their money from hedge funds than they did a month before, although the level remains far short of the stampede for the exits seen in the weeks after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, new figures show.

A barometer measuring investors’ decisions to redeem holdings, produced by financial technology firm SS&C Technologies, showed that its Forward Redemption Indicator in May showed notifications of 4.68 per cent, up from 3.68 per cent in April.

The data represents about 10 per cent of the $2.9 trillion hedge fund industry. The indicator is the sum of forward redemption notices received from investors in hedge funds administered by SS&C GlobeOp on the SS&C GlobeOp platform, divided by the assets under administration at the beginning of the month for SS&C GlobeOp fund administration clients on the platform.

To compare May’s figure with the peak, redemption notices hit a record of 19.27 per cent in the financial crisis maelstrom of November 2008. The all-time low was in January 2012. Within the past 12 months, the highest level was in December 2014, at 5.87 per cent, and the lowest, at 2.49 per cent, was in January this year.

At the start of May, Chicago, IL-headquartered Hedge Fund Research reported that its HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index gained by 0.8 per cent in April, extending 2015 gains, with positive contributions from exposure to emerging markets and energy.