AUM from $36M to $14M over 2010 to 2012. http://capitalistpig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/CPAM_Audit.pdf
Funds who take money from anyone off the street are a salesman's game. It's all about being in the news, TV shows, making it bigger and bigger while collecting hefty fees, then sell the fund if there's a good offer. Not to be racist or anything but 90% of the people listed in this thread are of a certain ethnicity.
You know the ethnicity of Hussman, Faber, Kohler, Gartman and Nusbaum? That's 5/9 of uncertain ethnicity. Only "Nusbaum" sounds vaguely Jewish, and it could just be a normal German name.
Some people can criticise ET, but at least we get to discuss the reality of things: " the point is that the 90% of the industry is based around this 'business' model with the goal TO COLLECT THOSE FEES." . Very clearly explained.
To be fair to Zweig, that fund pays decent dividends. I don't know if that graph is a total return or just a price graph. If the latter, it doesn't reflect the actual perf of the fund.
stockcharts adjusts for dividends http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=ZTR:SPY&p=W&b=5&g=0&id=p01679063070
How do you know that? Did a "guru" tell you ? I manage money for other people, i sure as hell don't say to them "I'm gonna beat the S&P500 (or any other market)". Investors who place money in hedge funds tend not to put all their money in such funds, they may already have a S&P500 index fund, they are looking for diversification away from that.
It applies to 99% of the financial industry - the money is mostly made on "services", one way or the other. Large funds fit that bill well, since it is mostly a diversification service, the source of alternative alpha. Is it really? Personally, I don't think so, HFRX index is pretty well correlated to S&P. FoFs apparently think otherwise.