All accredited investor means is you have $1m+ in net worth or $250k+ in salary. Out of the range of the average young American, but small peanuts for most people worrying about asset mabagement

I'm slightly less appalled now. It still baffles me though, as common sense would seem to indicate that having money and paying 3.6% are mutually exclusive.

Thanks for clearing that up.

(If only i had a cloth to clear my screen up too..)

If you have the degree of money to invest and you believe the expected the net return exceeds your other investments, you very well might make the bet.

We are, after all, talking about hedge funds. How much variance are you willing to tolerate?

In order to be an accredited investor as an individual, you need (quoted from Wikipedia) "a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year."

That's it.

Some investors are in fact wising up and moving away from hedge funds:

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/26/hedge-funds-suffer-207-billio...

http://thebamalliance.com/blog/hedge-funds-miss-the-mark/

The trick is that some hedge funds do produce outsize returns, and every rich customer wants to think he's going to pick the winner.

All in all, charging a percentage of AUM is a pretty neat scam they've got going for themselves.

> "3.6% of assets under management"

It's not an agreement to pay someone 3.6%. The author probably means that since you get 2 and 20, with a bit of performance it ends up being in that ballpark.

Their investors don't know what else to do with their cash.

Getting rich and doing something with the riches involve two different skill sets that most people can't master in one life time.

A lot of people regard it as a solved problem. (Stick it in in an index fund?).

Obviously you'd never advise someone to put all their eggs in one basket, but in this case, you're comparing identical baskets - and one of them as a hole in the bottom.

Aren't hedge funds often thematically a form of insurance? If I had a million, I'd probably put 80% in index funds, 10% in hedge funds that were shorting companies that would be negatively affected by global warming, 10% in hedge funds that were betting on another recession.

At one time, they were a "hedge", but the term is an anachronism today.

How is buying 3000+ of the worlds largest companies "putting eggs in the same basket"? Buying some bonds and real estate funds can be nice as well but the diversification benefits are usually overstated. Worldwide stocks are already incredibly diversified.

I maybe should have clarified:

In this case, the basket would be equities.

And in that respect, both are plays in the same market for wildly different charging structures.

An Index fund can refer to one of the many many different types of weighted/diverse indexes that exist.

Dumping all your money into an ASX200 Index Fund is a lot different to putting it all into Vanguards Total World Stock fund.

All the advice about simple investing is of the Total World Stock type.

There's no skill set involved in knowing how to invest reasonably these days. Index funds are cheap and plentiful.