New York Magazine – Not so long ago, the talk about hedge funds was all about their money—some guy you’d never heard of buying an $80 million piece of art or a $25 millionteardown in Greenwich, Connecticut, or paying himself $1 billion for a single year’s work. It was a spectator sport, absurd but entertaining, to a degree. Then the talk started to get serious, like,were hedge funds artificially bidding up the price of oil? What about that deal where a single trader ripped through $6 billion on a bad hunch about natural-gas prices—should that concern more thanjust the pissed-off people who entrusted him with their money? Or those two little bouts of panic the market has suffered this year already: Are hedge funds the virus that’s going to make the marketskeel over? Are they an evil cabal?

Questions like this now come up in casual conversation, but those conversations run out of steam fast because, though plenty of people fake it, few know much about hedge funds, other than that they made George Soros so rich he can influence world events and then everybody else wanted in. But as for what a hedge fund actually does—the only ones who know work at them, and they don’t talk about it. Plus you never see them anymore because they’re either in their caves or scuba-diving off Bora Bora.

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