Wall Street Journal Blogs – Are hedge-fund managers making a comeback with investors? The great recession hammered the hedge-fund industry in 2008. Returns tumbled, redemptions soared and investors began questioning the very underpinnings of the industry. Active managers promise to beat, rather than match, the market’s overall returns and charge fees that can be at least 10 times higher than those of index funds.
The WSJ reported in June that an increasing number of big investors are concluding that stock and bond pickers failed to add any value in the market turmoil and are shifting to index funds. A survey by Greenwich Associates at the time found that about one in five institutional investors said they recently had shifted money away from active managers and into passive index strategies. That was up from just 4% who expected to make that shift when asked from July to October 2008.
