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Sunday, September 2, 2007

The sheer chutzpah of hedge funds

Of all the mumbo-jumbo to pour out from the wacky world of alternative finance in recent years, nothing beats the hedge funds for sheer chutzpah.

When you are charging the earth for a service that's as old as the hills, you have to be pretty creative with your marketing.

The glorified money managers of Mayfair & Connecticut coined a whole new lexicon.

The original definition of hedge fund investing ought to be simple enough: a fund manager who "hedges" against the risk he might blow all your money - offsetting one bet with another in the opposite direction.

But just in case we didn't believe the magic trick, they made a few more enticing claims: funds were sold as "market neutral", promising "capital preservation" and "absolute return" regardless of what happened elsewhere.

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