The Hedge Fund Mirage

The dismal truth about hedge funds and how investors can get a greater share of the profits

Shocking but true: if all the money that's ever been invested in hedge funds had been in treasury bills, the results would have been twice as good.

Although hedge fund managers have earned some great fortunes, investors as a group have done quite poorly, particularly in recent years. Plagued by high fees, complex legal structures, poor disclosure, and return chasing, investors confront surprisingly meager results. Drawing on an insider's view of industry growth during the 1990s, a time when hedge fund investors did well in part because there were relatively few of them, The Hedge Fund Mirage chronicles the early days of hedge fund investing before institutions got into the game and goes on to describe the seeding business, a specialized area in which investors provide venture capital-type funding to promising but undiscovered hedge funds. Today's investors need to do better, and this book highlights the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the returns and risks are biased in favor of the hedge fund manager, and how investors and allocators can redress the imbalance.

• The surprising frequency of fraud, highlighted with several examples that the author was able to avoid through solid due diligence, industry contacts, and some luck
• Why new and emerging hedge fund managers are where generally better returns are to be found, because most capital invested is steered towards apparently safer but less profitable large, established funds rather than smaller managers that evoke the more profitable 1990s