A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that holds liquid assets and that makes use of complex trading and risk management techniques to improve investment performance and insulate returns from market risk. Among these portfolio techniques are short selling and the use of leverage and derivative instruments. In the United States, financial regulations require that hedge funds be marketed only to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals.
Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was a highly leveraged hedge fund. In 1998, it received a $3.6 billion bailout from a group of 14 banks, in a deal brokered and put together by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to "beat the market" consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information.
The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. was an American investment bank, securities trading, and brokerage firm that failed in 2008 during the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. After its closure it was subsequently sold to JPMorgan Chase. The company's main business areas before its failure were capital markets, investment banking, wealth management, and global clearing services, and it was heavily involved in the subprime mortgage crisis.
Alfred Winslow Jones was an American investor, hedge fund manager, and sociologist. He is credited with forming the first modern hedge fund and is widely regarded as the "father of the hedge fund industry."
Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller is an American billionaire investor, philanthropist and former hedge fund manager. He is the former chairman and president of Duquesne Capital, which he founded in 1981. He closed the fund in August 2010, at which time it had over $12 billion in assets. From 1988 to 2000, he managed money for George Soros as the lead portfolio manager for Quantum Fund. He is reported to have made $260 million in 2008.
Soros Fund Management, LLC is a privately held American investment management firm. It is structured as a family office, but formerly as a hedge fund. The firm was founded in 1970 by George Soros and, in 2010, was reported to be one of the most profitable firms in the hedge fund industry, averaging a 20% annual rate of return over four decades. It is headquartered at 250 West 55th Street in New York City. As of 2023, Soros Fund Management, LLC had US$25 billion in AUM.
Victor Niederhoffer is an American hedge fund manager, champion squash player, bestselling author and statistician.
Michael H. Steinhardt is an American billionaire hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and former antiquities collector. In 1967, he founded a hedge fund, Steinhardt Partners which he ran until he closed it in 1995. After a hiatus from work, he returned to head WisdomTree Investments in 2004. In January 2014 he was on the cover of Forbes Magazine, referred to as "Wall Street's greatest trader." Forbes reported his net worth at $1.1 billion as of October 2018.
Jack Schwager is a trader and author. His books include Market Wizards (1989), The New Market Wizards (1992), Stock Market Wizards (2001) and Unknown Market Wizards: The best traders you've never heard of (2020). He is a well-known author, fund manager and an industry expert in futures and hedge funds. He's published a number of books, such as Market Wizards.
George Soros is an American investor and philanthropist. As of October 2023, he had a net worth of US$6.7 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations, of which $15 billion has already been distributed, representing 64% of his original fortune. In 2020, Forbes called Soros the "most generous giver". He is a resident of New York.
The Quantum Group of Funds are privately owned hedge funds based in London, New York, Curaçao and Cayman Islands. They are advised by George Soros through his company Soros Fund Management. Soros started the fund in 1973 in partnership with Jim Rogers.
A synthetic CDO is a variation of a CDO that generally uses credit default swaps and other derivatives to obtain its investment goals. As such, it is a complex derivative financial security sometimes described as a bet on the performance of other mortgage products, rather than a real mortgage security. The value and payment stream of a synthetic CDO is derived not from cash assets, like mortgages or credit card payments – as in the case of a regular or "cash" CDO—but from premiums paying for credit default swap "insurance" on the possibility of default of some defined set of "reference" securities—based on cash assets. The insurance-buying "counterparties" may own the "reference" securities and be managing the risk of their default, or may be speculators who've calculated that the securities will default.
Farallon Capital Management, L.L.C. is an American multi-strategy hedge fund headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded by Tom Steyer in 1986, the firm employs approximately 230 professionals in eight countries around the world.
The Quants is the debut New York Times best selling book by Wall Street journalist Scott Patterson. It was released on February 2, 2010 by Crown Business. The book describes the world of quantitative analysis and the various hedge funds that use the technique. Two years later, Patterson published a follow-up book, Dark Pools: High Speed Traders, AI Bandits and the Threat to the Global Financial System, an investigative journey into the history of high-frequency trading and the spread of artificial intelligence in today’s markets.
Carol Junge Loomis is an American financial journalist, who retired in 2014 as senior editor-at-large at Fortune magazine.
Sebastian Christopher Peter Mallaby is an English journalist and author, Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Formerly, he was a contributing editor for the Financial Times and a columnist and editorial board member at The Washington Post.
Soros: The World's Most Influential Investor is a non-fiction book by Robert Slater, first released by McGraw Hill in 1996, that describes the early life, education, work, and philanthropy of a man many consider to be the most influential and successful investor of the twentieth century.
Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (2004) is a financial biography book. British journalist Mallaby is a highly ranked member of the Council on Foreign Relations, working in international economics.
