The barriers to entry in these kinds of status/credential fields are extremely high. Starting a new asset management firm is extremely difficult, and no custome

The barriers to entry in these kinds of status/credential fields are extremely high. Starting a new asset management firm is extremely difficult, and no customer is even going to talk to you until you have a five year track record of performance and a ton of marketing machinery surrounding it. Whether it's my grandma at the local bank or a huge endowment for a state teacher's union, people still want a handshake and a white-toothed car salesman smile when they hand over their money -- they want a false sense of security even if they are knowingly complicit in its falseness. Since you can't pop up overnight and start claiming "Hey, we've been around for X years so trust us" it makes it very hard. One exception is with small hedge funds that are created with a direct tie to a wealthy individual. That's almost always how small hedge funds start and few other types survive. Basically, there will be some semi-rich hot shot finance types who want to start a hedge fund, and then they have to convince some wealthy business contact, someone with usually > $100 MM in assets, who doesn't mind fronting the significant costs to get a small strategy up and running. Then, if it works, that wealthy person will effectively be the marketing department for a while and will recruit other wealthy connections to give somewhat small amounts of money, growing AUM slowly. If you really succeed beyond the 5-8 year mark, then you can start trying to tap into more traditional client streams. But basically, without a close connection to a significantly wealthy person, the status-based barriers to entry for things like management consulting and asset management are just too high.