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We conclude that hedge funds are far riskier and provide much lower returns than commonly supposed.
Sep 30, 2025
If I had to sum up my practical skills, I would use one word: survival. And operating a hedge fund utilized my training in survival to the fullest.
I don't think that hedge funds are bad per se. I think they're just one more financial tool. And in that sense, they're useful.
There's something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers
The number-one job of the hedge-fund manager is not to make sure that you can retire with a smile on your face - it's for him to retire with a smile on his face.
When a hedge-fund guy gets lucky because the market goes up, and he is going to make $200m, and you know $200 million, and he is going to pay almost no tax. I don't think that is a good thing for the country, and they are all supporting Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, all the hedge-fund guys. I don't want their support, because I'm totally self-funding my campaign.
Some PhD physicists write software or work for hedge funds, but physics still has a problem with having very smart people but not enough opportunities.
Substantially fewer films will be produced over the next year or two. And a significant portion of the production costs of the reduced slate will be borne by hedge funds and other investment groups.
The Fed is the greatest hedge fund in history.
As for another profession ... I suppose I'd manage a global-macro hedge fund. I love that kind of stuff. Weird, I know, but I find it fascinating.
Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit.
I've heard that one-half of the students at elite schools want to go into private equity or hedge funds. They want to keep up with their age cohorts at Goldman. This can't possibly end well in terms of meeting these expectations.
A file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there's this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. It's shrinking the overall economy. I think it's the mistake of our age.
Dozens of America's wealthiest taxpayers - including hedge fund legend Michael Steinhardt, super trial lawyer Guy Saperstein, and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's fame - have appealed to President Obama not to renew the Bush tax cuts for anyone earning more than $1 million a year.
I know hedge-fund guys that are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year and pay no tax. And I want to lower [tax] for the middle income. The middle class in this country has been decimated.
LTCM lost money when Russia defaulted on a certain class of bonds, and then they had other investments like on the spread between two different kinds of shares of Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. Now that seems completely unrelated to Russian bonds. But they were related because other hedge funds saw similar discrepancies and they were all making similar bets.
I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It's totally outrageous.
These 'masters of the universe' must be tamed in the interests of the ordinary families whose jobs and livelihoods are being put at risk. The Tories won't say anything about the current crisis as they are completely in the pockets of the hedge funds.
Hedge funds are a very efficient way of managing money. But there are clearly some risks. Hedge funds use credit and credit is a source of instability. Transactions involving credit should be regulated.
Successful hedge funds will be entrepreneurial; it is the essence of the craft.
There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things.
Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund. The Russians, the Saudis, the Chinese - all gave money to Bill And Hillary and got favourable treatment in return.
What I want people to know is I went to Wall Street before the crash. I was the one saying you're going to wreck the economy because of these shenanigans with mortgages. I called to end the carried interest loophole that hedge fund managers enjoy. I proposed changes in CEO compensation.
Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats - the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms - while the field hands are left with the scraps.
Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund, doing favors for oppressive regimes and many others in exchange for cash. Then when she left, she made $21.6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and other special interests in less than two years - secret speeches that she does not want to reveal to the public. Lobbyists, CEOs, and foreign governments totally own her, and that will never change if she ever became president.
Especially from my experience as a quant in a hedge fund - I naively went in there thinking that I would be making the market more efficient and then was like, oh my God, I'm part of this terrible system that is blowing up the world's economy, and I don't want to be a part of that.
Here's what income and wealth inequality is about. Last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers made more than 24 billion, enough to pay the salaries of 425,000 public school teachers. This level of inequality is neither moral or sustainable
Prosperity can't be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers. Democracy can't be just for billionaires and corporations. Prosperity and democracy are part of your basic bargain, too.
If we're talking about buying exchanges abroad, we have to have global securities standards, as we have global banking regulations. I'm talking about margins. Now, the United States has certain margin requirements that are not the same in London. Investors and hedge funds that want to borrow more money against securities ? if they can't in the U.S., they go abroad. That could add additional risks to the global economy.
The Federal Reserve was not founded to bail out Bear Stearns or a few hedge funds. It was founded to keep a stable currency and maintain its value.
Hedge funds are investment pools that are relatively unconstrained in what they do. They are relatively unregulated (for now), charge very high fees, will not necessarily give you your money back when you want it, and will generally not tell you what they do. They are supposed to make money all the time, and when they fail at this, their investors redeem and go to someone else who has recently been making money. Every three or four years they deliver a one-in-a-hundred year flood. They are generally run for rich people in Geneva, Switzerland, by rich people in Greenwich, Connecticut.
You have hedge funds and people like that buying these assets to yield 15 or 20 percent, I mean, that's the buyer for these people that are trying to unload them.
Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
Art is a form of asset. Hedge-fund managers who have made money fast should diversify into other areas.
Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I generally tell them 'I run a hedge fund.' The majority give me a strange look, so I quickly add, 'I am a money manager.' When the strange look persists, as it often does, I correct it to simply, 'I'm an investor.' Everyone knows what that is.
The hedge fund known as "Long Term Capital Management" collapsed last fall through overconfidence in its highly leveraged methods, despite I.Q.'s of its principals that must have averaged 160. Smart people aren't exempt from professional disasters from overconfidence. Often, they just run aground in the more difficult voyages they choose, relying on their self-appraisals that they have superior talents and methods.
You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous.
The free market is at its best when everybody works in a fish bowl and tells you their point of view The hedge funds and portfolio managers have a right to do this We've muted the analysts and their presence in the system.
It's my guess that something like 5% of GDP goes to money management and itsattendant friction. I define it broadly - annuities, incentive pay, all trading, etc. Nobody else has used figures that high, but that's my guess. Worst of all, the people doing this are among the best and the brightest. Hundreds and thousands of engineers, etc. are going into hedge funds and investment banking. That is not an intelligent allocation of the brainpower of the civilization.
Google the phrase "the most hated man in America." And this guy is one of the first people to pop up. Martin Shkreli, aka Pharma Bro, a 32-year-old drug company entrepreneur and former hedge fund manager who has a lot of money and loves to talk about how he spends it.
Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.
From coast to coast, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have ensnared people not only at hedge funds, but at technology and pharmaceutical companies, consulting and law firms, government agencies, and even a major stock exchange.
The global financial system consists of firms in the financial services sector - banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and the like - and various governmental agencies who are charged with regulating these firms.
Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.
Today, you've got hedge fund billionaires aligned with Karl Rove, running ads against me to try to get Democrats to vote for you [Bernie Sanders]. I know this game. I'm going to stop this game.
We live in a global market and money's fungible and hedge fund private equity is looking for momentum plays, and there ain't no momentum plays in bonds, right? When the interest rates were spiking up or down, well they never really spike down they do spike up though. Something's got to happen, there's got to be motion, the dice has to be rolling on the board, and if it's not then they're not going to play because they're not going to get the adrenaline rush from looking at... you know, money markets fund interest rates or bond interests or whatever. It's got to be sexy.
I can't figure out why anyone invests in active management, so asking me about hedge funds is just an extreme version of the same question. Since I think everything is appropriately priced, my advice would be to avoid high fees. So you can forget about hedge funds.
People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible.
I don't like writing straight-up thrillers. I like writing about families hurled into crisis and danger - soccer moms and regular dads and husbands who might have to rescue their daughters or who are, say, hedge fund managers and have one foot on the sidelines watching their kids and the other in nefarious cover-ups and conspiracies.