Do personal hedge funds count in the micro world? I've gotten serious advisory levels of interest at $2,000 before.
You need to educate yourself. RenTech is a legend, the hedge fund every quant-oriented fund prays they could come close to matching. Medallion has $10b aum, and haven't had a losing quarter in more than a decade. Only the ignorant or insane would preach to that outfit. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703494404575082000779302566.html
Well I do know one thing and that is that risk and reward are related. Therefore knowing that, I would. You wouldn't. The bread and butter of these hedge funds are those who don't understand he relationship between risk and reward. They walk with your money no matter what.
Only if you assume there's beta, no alpha. Most funds, that's probably the case. Medallion... Not even.
Medallion is in its own universe and you probably shouldn't try to fit it into what you normally think about hedge funds.
If you have enough capital to get into most of these hedge funds, you probably understand a thing or two about risk/reward.
"Zen" is probably a euphamism for crazy, nuts, insane, etc. They have a reputation for being a strange place to work and Dalio's "Zen" approach is encompassed within his Principles Handbook: http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgewater-Associates-Ray-Dalio-Principles.pdf
It is startling to see how low all these returns are compared to the market, you would have thought a few of these guys would have knocked it out of the park on such a strong year.