Why are Hedge Funds only available to High-Net-Worth investors?

Most Hedge Funds, especially the large ones, have minimum tickets that reach $1M or even more, which restricts the great majority of investors from accessing them.

At the same time, we can see that most pension funds allocate about 25% of their portfolios to Hedge Funds. And my private bank, for example, has a 20% allocation in Hedge Funds for all 3 risk-level portfolios that offers to me.

Yet, I cannot access Hedge Funds on my own. Why is this the case? Why the industry insists on keeping these ultra-high tickets?

23 Comments
 

Because they are a scam and regulators only want rich people to be scammed.

 

It's because $1m is the threshold it takes to be considered a "sophisticated investor" due to the lack of regulation in this particular space, the govt wants people to do their homework before they toss their cash into these funds. Your private bank can access those hedge funds because they have done their due-diligence and in turn feel confident in offering that investment to you

 

If u were at a HF worth a damn, you'd know HFs don't have an index or benchmark to outperform or underperform.

"Intern in HF - Other" The real reason is, that only HNW’s can afford paying for preftigious professionals from the best schools with the best grades to underperform the index.

And this is coming from me, who is currently interning at a very prominent HF.

 
Most Helpful

I've been working at MM hedge funds for years. All that matters is positive P&L, making money for your investors, and taking a butt load of money home.

Show me hedge fund marketing material that compares performance vs. the market. Even a hedge fund index is useless because you can't compare a market-neutral L/S equity fund's performance to a mult-asset quant fund performance.

Seems like it's rocket science for you.

"Intern in HF - Other" No they are not.

L/S equity, activist hedge funds and other long-only equity hedge funds definitely need to be compared to equityindexes. This is not rocket science. Just common sense.

 

Hedge funds are 'riskier' in some sense, so they intend in theory to restrict access to those who know what they are getting into (or should)

 

1) Hedge Funds often adopt strategies that are technically complex. In contrast with the broader population, there's a general presumption that HNW investors are reasonably financially literate (and therefore can't complain if a strategy blows up and takes their investment with it).

2) Removing the HNW barrier could potentially allow predatory funds to spring up and encourage retail investors into high risk products they don't understand.

3) For Hedge Funds, operationally dealing with small ticket sizes (250k) adds to the workload for the back office and is more work for less fee-generating FUM.

4) Most retail investors don't have diversified enough portfolios to really benefit from Hedge Funds. The benefit for allocators/pension funds in allocating to HF's is providing some downside protection and diversification to an already diversified portfolio.

5) HF selection is really hard. There are a huge number of often secretive funds that are spread over a multitude of geographies. I previously worked as a HF allocator and in spite of the fact that it was my full time job, I found it incredibly hard to keep up with the sheer number of funds that are operating (and that's without considering the fact that ~90% of them aren't really worth investing in).

 

Because they can earn more and provide more personalized CRM relationship.

 

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