The 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers made a combined $21 billion in 2013 | Hacker News Reader

The 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers made a combined $21 billion in 2013

nytimes.com

6 pointsapplecore5 comments

This is highly misleading. This money is mostly not from fees, but simply the return made on their own wealth invested in their funds.

See http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-06/billionaire...

You have a point but that article is also a little misleading. It assumes every hedge fund manager has 100% of his wealth in the funds. To be fair the writer admits that he is just guessing but that is a high guess.

Also, the S&P had its best year in 16 years last year, so you would expect people to do well on their investments this year. The thing that Warren Buffer is very critical of is that hedge funds get a lot of fees even in years that they do really poorly. That sets them up to win big when the market does well.

There is an illusion, cultivated by instutional investors and the people ripping them off, that instutional investors are very savvy. It is not always true.

so none of em made as much as the whatsapp guys? bummer wall street, you gotta keep up.

I know you're joking, but you're comparing the one-off sale of an entire business to (very possibly repeatable) annual income.

Oh sure but they GENERALLY do an amazing job of what they sell("give us lots of money and we'll get you more back") in order to pull down that compensation. The people who hire them(i.e. deposit in their fund products) seem to be cool with the fees(meaning it is "worth it" to the high net worth crowd vs. vanguard or w/e...whether that's rational and based on returns or just prestige of "I have my money with Cerberus"). If it weren't "worth it" then either people would use the alternative lower fee investment vehicles or someone would "disrupt" the space with a cheaper hedge fund offering better returns.

Of course it can all fall apart(LTCM lol)

Plus the huge factor of their personal capital generating a sizeable chunk of this return at the same rate as their fund investor's capital.

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