Bloomberg – Too greedy. Too many of them. Too much competition. Those were just a few of the reasons why such financial gurus as George Soros and Bill Gross were telling us the booming hedge-fundindustry was running out of steam.
There’s just one snag. It hasn’t happened — and right now it doesn’t look like it will anytime soon.
Instead, hedge funds — loosely regulated groups of wealthy investors who use risky strategies to try to earn high returns — are roaring ahead. New ones are being started, performance has recovered, and fund managers are making initial public offerings. Share prices are up. On any measure you care to look at, the hedge funds are doing better than ever.
“What we are seeing is a fresh boom for the industry,” Jacob Schmidt, director of London-based consulting firm Schmidt Research Partners, said in a telephone interview. “The hedge funds have now moved into the mainstream of asset management.”
Rewind a year or so, and there was no shortage of people predicting the heyday of the industry was coming to a close. The talk was of sunsets, not sunrises.
