Skip to footer

The hedge fund mini-crisis

The hedge fund industry may be just as overbuilt as the credit and housing markets were.

|
Wally Santana/AP/File
Is the hedge fund bubble about to burst? Many experts think so.

Yesterday I linked to Gabriel Sherman's sprawling State of Wall Street piece in New York Magazine.  There was one particular quote about the hedge fund industry's own little mini-crisis - anonymous of course - that deserves a highlighting here as quote o' the day...

“We used to rely on the public making dumb investing decisions,” one well-known Manhattan hedge-fund manager told me. “but with the advent of the public leaving the market, it’s just hedge funds trading against hedge funds. At the end of the day, it’s a zero-sum game.” Based on these numbers—too many funds with fewer dollars chasing too few trades—many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the past year and a half.

Sherman points out that there were 600 hedge funds in 1990, ten years later there were 4000.   Now there are almost 10,000, a few thousand more than anyone really has any use for.  The barriers to entry have basically disappeared (raise a million bucks, spend a third of it on admin stuff and you're in the game).  But all of the data says that the bottom half of the industry is starving - virtually all of the flows have been going to the biggest funds out there for a few years now.

When Sherman says that the hedge fund industry is just as overbuilt as the credit and housing markets were, I completely agree.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to The hedge fund mini-crisis
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Reformed-Broker/2012/0208/The-hedge-fund-mini-crisis
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe