Hedge Fund Investing. Mirabile Kevin R.

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      Although all these roles are certainly not essential on day one, most will be added as the funds grow in size and complexity or as they attract more institutional investors.

      A mutual fund is a highly regulated investment vehicle managed by a professional investment manager. It aggregates smaller investors into larger pools that create economies of scale and efficiency related to research, commissions, and diversification. Mutual funds have been available to investors in a wide range of asset classes since the mid-1970s and became increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of retail attention, product deregulation, and solid returns. Mutual funds generally cannot use leverage or short selling and generally cannot use most derivatives. Collective investment products originated in the Netherlands in the 18th century, became popular in England and France, and first appeared in the United States in the 1890s. The creation of the Massachusetts Investors’ Trust in Boston heralded the arrival of the modern mutual fund in 1924. The fund went public in 1928, eventually spawning the mutual fund firm known today as MFS Investment Management. State Street Investors started its mutual fund product line in 1924 under the stewardship of Richard Paine, Richard Saltonstall, and Paul Cabot. In 1928, Scudder, Stevens, and Clark launched the first no-load fund.

      The creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the passage of the Securities Act of 1933 and 1934 provided safeguards to protect investors in mutual funds. Mutual funds were required to register with the SEC and provide disclosure in the form of a prospectus. The Investment Company Act of 1940 put in place additional regulations that required more disclosures and sought to minimize conflicts of interest. At the beginning of the 1950s, the number of open-end funds topped 100. In 1954, the financial markets overcame their 1929 peak, and the mutual fund industry began to grow in earnest, adding some 50 new funds over the course of the decade. The 1960s saw more than 100 new funds established and billions of dollars in new investment inflows. The bear market of the late 1960s resulted in a temporary outflow and a minor reversal of the trend in growth. Later, in the 1970s, Wells Fargo Bank established the first passively managed index fund product, a concept used by John Bogle to found the Vanguard Group. Today, mutual funds manage more than $15 trillion on behalf of a wide range of investors.

      Hedge funds only emerged as an investment product in the late 1960s. Alfred Winslow Jones is considered to have been the first hedge fund manager, in that he used leverage and short selling to modify portfolio returns and was paid an incentive fee. Hedge funds, however, provide investors with investment opportunities that are very different from those available from traditional investments such as mutual funds. Hedge funds are also regulated and structured differently from mutual funds and thus have certain unique properties, although both operate using expert managers on behalf of passive investors. Hedge funds are designed to offer investors an absolute return, less volatility, and lower correlation to traditional investment benchmarks such as the S&P 500 and the various bond indices.

      Hedge funds offered as private onshore or offshore funds do share some common features with the more traditional mutual fund; however, they also have some very significant differences. There are seven major differences between a private hedge fund and a traditional stock or bond mutual fund that are worth noting: