What value? Numbers in balance sheets is not value, per se, and optimizing those numbers is also not necessarily value. Take things down to their bare essential

What value? Numbers in balance sheets is not value, per se, and optimizing those numbers is also not necessarily value. Take things down to their bare essentials, what's the economic utility of hedge fund managers? Are they optimizing investment? Are they doing investment at all? Are they helping to ensure liquidity in the market? Are they helping to ensure the markets operate smoothly? Are they extracting rents? Are they merely shifting wealth? It's funny you mention the middle ages, because there are a lot of parallels there, I think. Tax collectors would bring in massive wealth for their employers, but would anyone say that such wealth was fairly and honestly come by? Middle ages governments were rarely consensual and most of their expenditures were not to the benefit of those they ruled. I think if you look at hedge funds you'll see a lot of similarities. A lot of their wealth comes not from investments or from facilitating economic activity. Rather, a lot of it can be characterized as extractive and even exploitative. Hedge funds are not just about managing huge amounts of wealth, painting them as such is a diversion. They are about using money to extract even more money from whatever "market" it is possible to do so, and at whatever cost. Worse yet, hedge funds have so corrupted and influenced our governments that they've been able to socialize their losses during economic crashes, without being forced to socialize their gains during booms. Additionally, some of the largest wealth transfers in history are occurring right now through stock buyback programs, which substantially benefit stock owners and especially hedge funds. Meanwhile, hedge funds are not actually producing substantial returns for their investors, most do worse than index funds. So somehow they manage to be both really bad for democracy, bad for a lot of the things they poke their fingers in (where they look at only the bottom line and attempt to extract the most dollars in the shortest time frame, the worst characterization of the influence of the stock market), and yet they are still bad at providing a decent RoI. But hedge fund managers pay themselves well, certainly. It's little more than the same old problem of oversized corporate executive pay scaled up. Whether they perform well or poorly the refrain is always "oh, but here you are dealing with a different class of people, the CEO class or the hedge-fund-manager class, and they are oh so unusual and special that they demand a higher caliber of pay even when they fail, because you see if you were to get some schlub off the street to do the work they would have cocked it up far worse, so you should be thankful". This despite all evidence imaginable to the contrary. It's simply a matter of elitism and classism run amok, which might as well be a new type of aristocracy. (As for your last comment, this is already done, the only "automated financial tools" most investors need is an index fund, which not only outperforms almost all hedge funds it also outperforms most other types of active investments.)