Hedge funds have had a rough time of late. Too many funds chasing too little money. I'm not surprised that many of them aren't doing well. This is already st

Hedge funds have had a rough time of late. Too many funds chasing too little money. I'm not surprised that many of them aren't doing well. This is already starting to shake out as the sell side has gotten out of the fund business. Having said that > Think of how a recent, less technical study showed that Apple, Facebook, and Google are three of the most widely held hedge fund investments. Umm not sure why that would be a knock on hedge funds. Wouldn't you expect them to hold some of the most high performing stocks over the past few years? I mean, isn't that pretty much the exact premise of a stock picking hedge fund? They pick the market winners so you don't have to hold the entire market, losers included? There are lots of reasons to hate on hedge funds but that point shows the blogger really had their premise determined before even starting to analyze the paper and data. Remember, the premise for many hedge funds is that they hedge the down side, in 2008 funds outperformed the market. http://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8093957/hedge-fund-racket-chart http://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8093957/hedge-fund-racket-chart Hedge fund returns in aggregate are also driven down by the large number of funds that are started up and fail within the first 3 years, I've seen stats with 3 year close down as high as 80%. Judging hedge funds by aggregate would be like someone looking at the startup market and saying, "Hey 80% of companies fail within the first 5 years, why would anyone invest or work for a startup when they have such awful failure rates." The truth ends up being the same for both startups and hedge funds, most fail fast and only lose the owners money, with a smaller amount failing in 2 years with angle funding, and an even smaller amount failing in 3 years with outside investor money.