New York Post – Despite headlines about hedge funds that got decimated after making complicated bets on mortgages or energy, the most basic investment strategy of picking which stocks will rise and which will fall – known as long-short equity strategy – is turning out to be one that’s giving hedge-fund managers fits.
Indeed, hedge funds are finding that today’s choppy markets are proving to be tougher to navigate than the terrible years following the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. And it helps to explain why so many hedge funds have called it quits and instead are moving into cash.
The hedge-fund industry is seeing its worst results in recent memory, down an average of 4.09 percent year-to-date, according to the Hennessee Hedge Fund Index. Long-short equity funds, rarely expected to be losers, are nevertheless down 3.2 percent for the year.
