History
The hedge fund industry as we know it today began in 1949 when Alfred Winslow Jones, a sociologist and journalist, launched a hedge fund after becoming enamored with stock-market forecasting. His investment strategies (short selling, leverage, and incentive fees) generated better-than-average investment returns, which prompted other financial firms to start their own hedge funds. Today, there are more than 30,000 hedge funds in the world, according to BarclayHedge (a provider of alternative investment data), and analysts help these firms make multi-million-dollar investment decisions.
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