This is what the hedge funds that won 2014 looked like

Last year was a tough one for hedge funds.

A recent Citi survey found hedge fund profits down for the year about $10 billion dollars - or 30 percent - from the year prior, and indexes from research firms eVestment and Preqin put hedge fund returns up around 3 percent - just a fraction of the S&P 500's 13.7 percent return.

But there were of course some winners.

Here are some common traits that last year's top performing funds shared, courtesy of Preqin's 2015 Global Hedge Fund Report:

Their core strategies were probably equity strategies.

Of the top 20 performers, 75 percent used equity strategies. Of the top 10, equity strategy funds had a higher median return (59 percent) than any other type.

They've most likely been active for more than five years.

57 percent of all top performers had been active at least since 2009.

There's a good chance their manager was based in North America.

13 percent of top performing managers were based in New York, 4 percent in Canada, and 3 in California.

They tended to be less risky.

They invested heavily in India.

Last year's No. 1 performer was Arcstone Capital's Passage to India Opportunity Fund, a long-bias, value-oriented fund that saw a 225 percent net return.

Two other top performers were Alchemy India Long-Term Fund (up 60 percent) and ArthVeda Alpha India L50 (up 39 percent).

Though this may have seemed like an obscure bet at the beginning of 2014, India's Sensex, the benchmark index of the Bombay Stock Exchange, actually rose about 30 percent throughout the year.