Do you know everything went back to normal in 60 some days? Those quants were back in business shooting fish in the barrel as usual. No one shed a tear here or there.
it is a case of schadenfreude and not true. these hedge fund manger will still have their homes,trophy wifes golf memberships etc at the end of this debacle. the question is why did so many "sophisticated" people put their money into these hedge funds when the usual fees of 2% + 20 made the entire proposition impractical. my answer is that investors had the feeling they were getting into some exclusive club that you could not get into.
lol What kind of analysis is this? There are around 10,000 hedge funds out there. There are always some down 20% in any given month and thanks to high watermarks they close shop. This happens all the time, this is business as usual. Just like public companies on exchanges are being delisted or are getting trashed announcing terrible earnings driving them into bankruptcy. Whenever 50 hedgefunds are in trouble in any given month I read how terribly incompetent the other 9950 managers are and how they overcharge people. Hubris.
Yes you're right, those funds can say the darned market got them, not their incompetence. But this is GS after all.
what percentage of funds outperform a simple buy and hold strategy after all expenses are included. just for the record taxes are an expense even if not included in a performance record.
Your criticism is missing the point. No hedge fund investor is interested in outperforming your simple buy and hold strategy. Outperformance is (almost) entirely irrelevant. Hedge Funds are measured by their ability to deliver risk adjusted returns. The typical HF investor is looking for a) positive monthly/quarterly/annual returns regardless of the performance of the strategies' underlying markets (e.g. equities, commodities, currencies etc.) b) low volatility of returns.
It really seems Alpha's strategy has deep underlying difficulties. If they can't turn 2007 around this will be their 3rd consecutive year in the red, I don't think they can blame market conditions. I believe they returned 100% net of fees from 1999-2004 but I guess now it's time to call it a day and return the money to all outside investors.