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It's pretty disingenuous to compare numbers from two different time spans. I don't know where the authors numbers come from but he says the drop was 20% in 2008.

Your numbers add an additional 6 months during which the S&P 500 dropped significantly: https://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXSP:.INX

additionaly, the time period you cite seems hand picked to start at the high and end at the low.

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You're right, the period was "hand picked", but that's because I was looking at a 5 year graph with the high and low marked, and just used those numbers. The movement before/after 2008 wasn't the 40 percentage points that would be needed for the hedge funds to do as poorly as the market, so I didn't bother.

But I just looked the exact numbers up. The S&P 500 opened January 2nd at 1467.97 and closed December 31st at 903.25. A 38.5% loss instead of the 60% I said, but that's still almost twice the loss of the hedge funds.

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