Heh heh heh this is exactly the right question. A fund is just another tradable instrument. I don't see much difference between evaluating the fund's manageme

Heh heh heh this is exactly the right question. A fund is just another tradable instrument. I don't see much difference between evaluating the fund's management and historical performance vs. evaluating those of a public corporation -- except that in the latter case, you can probably get more information. I saw an analysis somewhere that claimed that for mutual funds, annual performance is negatively autocorrelated: the funds that are likeliest to do well next year are the ones that did the worst last year. I wouldn't be surprised if this held true for hedge funds as well.