What do hedge fund managers do on a day to day basis?

Depends on how the fund is structured/how idea generation is handled, and also whether the "fund manager" is also the portfolio manager.

Some of the things the CEO does at my fund: 1) Raise money/deal with existing investors-basically schmooze existing investors, new potential, fund of fund guys, etc 2) Attend investment committee meetings-our CEO is rarely if ever involved in generating ideas or researching our investments but new investments are presented to the basically the entire investment team and debated amongst the group, and he is an active participant in that stage of the investment process. 3) Manage the "business" of the fund (ie managing his employees, handling our legal/compliance etc stuff with our service providers) 4) Speak to various reporters from industry publications that call (good way to generate publicity by being quoted in Bloomberg or whatever)

Things our PM does: 1) Monitor the portfolio (we have a lot of types of debt with various levels of liquidity, some of it doesn't really trade per se so this is more of an issue of keeping up on how the companies are doing by reading reports the analysts put together based on information the borrowers send us and talking to management) 2) Talk to various sales coverage and traders about credits we're interested in 3) Work with the analysts to generate trade/investment ideas 4) Basically act as our trader since our stuff is fairly illiquid-if we were bigger/if we were in more trading-oriented products we'd have a dedicated trader.