It's silly to say "hedge funds aren't working out so well right now" because this has always been the case. Additionally, there are a lot of nuances of hedge f

It's silly to say "hedge funds aren't working out so well right now" because this has always been the case. Additionally, there are a lot of nuances of hedge funds that are being missed in the comments. Hedge funds can do things on a small scale with hundreds of millions of dollars that would never scale to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and therefore have opportunities to make money that an individual investing into a publicly available fund wouldn't. Take parking lots in China, for example. A hedge fund can say "hey these are really under priced compared to what they might be in 10 years" and run lots of data to show the most under-priced lots. They can spend $50 million dollars on these lots and make ridiculous returns at relatively little risk. However, this same strategy wouldn't work with millions of investors cumulatively investing trillions of dollars. There aren't enough parking lots to go around. Also, hedge funds are not black boxes. They communicate to their investors what their strategies are and their feedback on how strategies are progressing. Most investors can even say "Hey I want you to use my funds mostly on X" even if your returns are based on the entire fund's portfolio.