Hedge funds have been around since 1949. The creator of the modern hedge fund is Alfred Winslow Jones. He started the first one in the USA. He had an interesting background. He was born in Melbourne, Australia on Sept 9, 1900, to American parents. He graduated from Harvard in 1923, and then completed his PhD at Columbia later on. He travelled to Spain during their civil war and shared a bottle of whiskey with Ernest Hemingway. He was rumoured to have worked for the OSS, now the CIA while there.
He was a former US diplomat in Berlin, Germany, and a financial journalist at Fortune magazine in New York. He saw an opportunity to change careers at age 48, and moved into money management in 1949. He raised $100,000 US dollars, including $40,000 dollars of his own, and started a simple long/short strategy. He had skin in the game, 40% in fact. He created a fee structure that was inspired by ancient merchant Phoenician ships 2000+ years ago. It turned out to be a great way to only pay 25% capital gains taxes. The top US tax bracket for high income individuals in 1949 was 91%! Very high indeed.
He bought the best performing stocks, and hoped they would rise in value, and also shorted the worst performing ones hoping they would fall. He also used leverage in order to maximize his performance. He formed a limited partnership to share all profits. It did well and started to charge 20% fees for himself as the managing partner from outside investors based on his positive results. He was able to outperform all mutual funds of the day, and soon afterwards began to be recognized after a 5 year track record. He was profitable in 31 out of 34 years that he ran his "hedged fund" under the name A.W.Jones. He passed away in 1989 at age 88.
Because he combined, both long & short selling, used leverage, and even formed a limited partnership structure, he is now known as the father of the current hedge fund industry. Many new strategies have since developed, and the assets of the industry have grown to more than US$1 Trillion dollars globally. Many hedge funds are now in cities like New York, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and even Melbourne, Australia. This is the first of a continuing series by TMJ Partners, creator of TopMoneyJobs.com.
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