What is Absolute Return?

I remember in college coming across this term and trying to google it (given this was a number of years ago), but nothing pulled up that gave a really good definition. For all of you who are still wondering, absolute returns is simply that, a predetermined rate of return for a given time period that a fund seeks to achieve regardless of the overall market condition. For example, a fund might say they target 15% annual return regardless of whether the year was an overall bear or bull market.

Absolute return strategies are different than investments that benchmark their performance against an index, which varies from year to year, such as the S&P or NASDAQ 100.