Its profit may be down, but things are looking up for the Man Group.

The world’s biggest publicly-traded hedge fund manager said yesterday that it exceeded its own expectations on just about all of the metrics that count. Its first fiscal-half pretax profit of US$302 million, though down from US$622 million, is 8% better than it predicted. The firm also took in US$5 million more in management fees than it expected—US$245 million—and about US$17 million more in performance fees, which stood at $47 million.

The firm’s net income dropped by more than half to US$248 million.

Assets under management at the firm remained stable at US$44 billion, and CEO Peter Clarke told Bloomberg News that redemptions have returned to “historical levels.”

“We expect our assets to grow,” he said.