>It was basically impossible to lose money, no matter what you invested in It's always possible to lose money. One obvious way was to say "I'm not panicking, t

>It was basically impossible to lose money, no matter what you invested in It's always possible to lose money. One obvious way was to say "I'm not panicking, there's no reason to panic" as the market crashed and capitulate right as it hit bottom, and spend the rest of the year saying "why is the market going up, it makes no sense, the world is ending". It's easy to second guess yourself. Suppose you were entirely invested in biotechnology for several years prior to covid. Surely that is a good position to be in. After over a year, in retrospect, it is. But in the initial selloff, biotech crashed with everything else. Psychologically, how do you react? Do you say to yourself, everybody (the market) is wrong? Or are you conditioned to think the market knows better than almost any individual. The market was wrong as it turned out. I mean, covid treatment and vaccines are not gold mines for the private sector in themselves, thank god, but the pandemic is obviously driving and will continue to drive a realization of how important biotechnology is in general. >their standard 2% of assets/20% of profits annual fee structure is absurd I wonder when that became the "standard". Before I heard of the term "hedge fund", I heard of people charging 1% and 10%. Like in the early 80s. A joke I heard (not sure if apocryphal) was someone naive asked "if you charge 10% of the profits, does that mean you give back 10% of the losses?" The answer: "Oh, no, that would be unprofessional" > that is what hedge funds are designed for. In an era where you can buy pretty much any security for free with a few clicks, their standard 2% of assets/20% of profits annual fee structure is absurd I don't understand, you seem to imply that any decent hedge fund makes obscene amounts of money, but if they did, then high fees would not be absurd - problem is, they mostly don't.