A Quant in Action: Cliff Asness, one of the many Goldman Sachs alums toiling away in the hedge-fund business, now runs AQR Capital, a quantitative trading firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut.    (Photo: Michael Edwards)

A hedge fund is a hedge fund is a hedge fund …
A persistent misconception in the general public is that all hedge funds act alike. Not true. On the one hand, you have the nerd brigade, with their fine-tuned software-driven investment strategies that are constantly refined by “rocket scientists”—Ph.D.’s who have decided they want more out of life (i.e., money) than the view from an ivory tower. They’re called “quants,” short for quantitative investors, and their current king is Long Island–based James Simons of Renaissance Technologies. He’s an academic at heart: Simons’s interview process is said to involve a presentation on some finding about the capital markets. At the opposite extreme, you have the table-pounding, executive-belittling activists such as Daniel Loeb of Third Point and Thomas Hudson of the imaginatively named Pirate Capital. (Argh! We be swashbuckling investors!) Tactics like theirs get the most press—and thus tend to define public perception of hedge funds—despite the fact that most hedge funds rely far more on brains than brawn. That said, some of the finest drama does come from public battles like that launched by Loeb on home-appliance maker Salton Inc., in which he claimed to have seen the company’s CEO “sipping chilled Gewürztraminer” at the U.S. Open on the company dime. (Real hedge-fund managers don’t drink German wine?)

In the popular imagination, a hedge-fund trader sits at a console that looks like it could launch a mission to Mars and spends his whole day making rapid-fire decisions about what to buy and sell. There are definitely people like this (Stevie Cohen of SAC Capital, for one), but most hedge-fund offices are a lot quieter. A typical long/short firm sets up its positions and then might spend days or weeks doing nothing more than seeing what happens to them. Maybe one afternoon, they’d really throw down and have a tweedy professor in to pitch an arcane finance theory. It can be really, really boring to work at a hedge fund.

A brief psychographic portrait:
According to a survey of 294 fund managers with a net worth of $30 million or more by Russ Alan Prince, the author of Fortune’s Fortress, 97 percent of hedge-fund managers see their portfolios as themselves personified. And here’s what else they think about: failure. Fifty-four percent of them say they suffer from the Icarus syndrome, a fear of flying too close to the sun and crashing to Earth. They also think about staring down the barrel of a gun: Almost three-quarters believe their wealth makes them a target of criminals. This is the life we can’t stop talking about? (Yes, it is. And here’s why: Three out of ten of us think the average hedge-fund pro makes more than $10 million a year. He doesn’t, but he might as well for how much we already hate him for it.)

Hedge funds sometimes get confused with private equity, the financial specialty that’s gotten the most ink these past few months. Private-equity investors like the Blackstone Group or KKR differ from your typical hedge fund in that they tend to take more long-term, controlling stakes in companies—often taking them private in the process—in hopes of doing some financial engineering that results in a huge windfall. The luminaries in private equity—men like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman (he of the $3 million, Rod Stewart–entertained birthday party in February) and KKR’s Henry Kravis—are more a product of the pin-striped, backroom, cigar-smoking ethos than hedge-fund managers, who generally wear khakis at their trading desks and shrink from attention.

You can think of them as products of the yin and yang of Wall Street’s traditional powerhouses. Private-equity people are “people people”—their ranks full of former pros of the relationship-driven investment-banking side of the business. Hedge-fund people are much more likely to come from the trading side: quicker to draw, quicker to shoot, and not inclined to spend a whole lot of time discussing the thinking behind it all. “They measure their performance every day. They wonder, ‘If I buy this today, will I look stupid tomorrow?’ ” says a private-equity professional. “A private-equity guy is sitting there thinking, ‘What will the world look like in three to five years?’ ”

Both industries share an addiction to leverage, which is to say, borrowed money. They use it liberally to maximize the return of a good deal or a good trade. From the very beginning, in fact, hedge funds were premised on the notion that they could exploit minute profit-making opportunities by placing big leveraged bets. The “hedge” in hedge funds originally referred to the downside protection a fund would simultaneously employ by, yes, hedging. Typically, that would mean buying one stock and shorting another. While many hedge funds still employ actual hedging techniques, the practice has gone out of vogue. But leverage hasn’t, and that means big bets with little or no downside protection. In a word, risky.

And why are they so rich?
One thing hedge-funders uniformally agree on is that they are worth what they are paid. Running your own hedge fund is the fastest way to make a fortune known to man. The typical fee structure is known by the vernacular “2 & 20”—most funds take a 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of any profits. (Some take far more. James Simons, for example, charges a nominally obscene 5 & 44.) The result: A $1 billion fund posting a 30 percent return delivers a $78.8 million payday for its managers. A $1 billion fund posting a zero percent return can still spread around $20 million to its employees. The best managers do a lot better than breaking even, mind you, and as a result, a handful of hedge-fund kingpins take home more than $500 million in annual compensation. Although hedge-fund people tend not to advertise their wealth to the world, those in the community are hyperaware of who among them is hot and who is not. Consider that David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, a widely respected manager, has lately been the talk of the hedge-fund town for his big losses in a subprime-lending stock. Hedge-funders go in for Schadenfreude as much as the next guy.

In a sign of hedge funds’ growing clout in other spheres, in late January, Senator Chuck Schumer called twenty or so of the top hedge-fund managers and invited them to the Upper East Side Italian restaurant Bottega del Vino. It was supposed to be a friendly chat—Schumer’s message was, you talk to us about what’s going on, and nobody has to worry about too much interference from regulators. It’s chilling to think of all that secret power assembled in one place, like the Cosa Nostra Apalachin summit in 1957. Attendees included Jim Chanos of Kynikos Capital, Rich Chilton of Chilton Investment Co., Stevie Cohen, Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones II of Tudor Capital, and David Tepper of Appaloosa Management. The combined assets under management of those attending had to have been $200 billion.

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• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Duff McDonald
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