Hedge funds are privately controlled and notoriously secretive investment firms with billions of dollars in assets. Here's a document listing all of the income, salaries, and spending for one hedge fund over several years.
The Nobel Foundation, which has been handing out the world's most prestigious prizes for more than a century, knows a lot of good economists. Maybe they should ask them how to make some money?
College endowments are much flashier than they used to be. They frequently reach into the billions of dollars; they attract top investing talent; and, most notably, the majority of their money is in "alternative" investments like private equity and hedge funds. Is this hurting students' ability to be proper idealists?
For 80 years, it's been illegal for hedge funds to advertise to the public, due to various SEC regulations. Now, those regulations are changing. Hedge funds will soon be able to advertise! *Eyes you up and down* Probably not to you, though.
The Renaissance Technologies Medallion fund is one of the most successful hedge funds in history, earning an average profit of 80% per year over the last quarter of a century. The IRS believes the fund has been successful— too successful— at dodging taxes.
It used to be that only the very rich had the opportunity to lose money by investing in hedge funds. Now, you can too!
In 2012, the hedge fund Clive Capital lost 8.8% for its investors. In return for this negative performance, the fund paid its top partner $33.5 million.
The parents of Avenues, the new for-profit private school that caters to the children of "hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street," have had an exciting first year. From a seven-page e-mail sent by parents about the lack of snacks, to a different series of emails about a homeless man's butt-crack, they remain committed to giving their children an education that matches their hard-fought wealth (part of the demand for the school was that all the other private schools in New York are clogged with legacy-students, AKA old money).
Stanley Druckenmiller is a legendary hedge fund manager, former partner of George Soros, and billionaire investor. He is one of the more levelheaded and reasonable of the hedge fund gods. He's made billions of dollars by reading the world economy correctly for several decades. So it's worth at least passing on the fact that he is convinced that a new financial crash is looming for America. Worse than the last one!
Last October, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer tracked the course of a Argentine navy ship, Libertad, as it crossed the globe. When it docked in Ghana, his firm, NML Capital, convinced a judge there to hold the ship in port until Argentina could pay its 1.3 billion debt to him, debt still owed from when the Argentine economy completely collapsed in 2001.
In an anti-climatic finish to the Court Case of the Century, hedge fund manager Daniel Shak withdrew his lawsuit seeking his share of his ex-wife's million dollar shoe collection. Beth Shak, the ex-wife, and, according to the New York Post, a "pretty pro poker player," denied any wrong doing, saying Mr. Shak knew about the collection and even encouraged it. As Ms. Shak told the Post:
Now and then, we get forwarded crazy emails that people — most of whom are men involved in the finance industry — send to the people they're dating, or have dated, or want to date. Today: a thesaurus-happy hedge-fund manager accuses a woman he's been on one date with of lying to him and decides he'll teach her the best way to reject someone.
Peter Thiel is finally admitting there's a big blotch on his resumé that needs to be cleaned up. Becoming Facebook's first institutional investor was brilliant; thinking he was smart enough to predict big economic swings was incredibly dumb. Six billion dollars dumb. So Thiel will retreat into tech investing.
All you investors with your crazy research and economic "theories": You should just be reading Twitter! Derwent Capital, a hedge fund that bases its investment strategy on Twitter data, outperformed the market in its first month.
