( www.thestreet.com ) – Steve Martin used to tell a joke about the simple steps you need to take to become a millionaire. After pumping up the crowd in TonyRobbins fashion — asking “Are you ready?” — he’d rattle off his first step: “Okay, first you get a million dollars.”
His answer also provides the first step needed to have access to the tony, exclusive world of hedge funds. Hedge funds are private investment partnerships for institutions and wealthy individual investors that, unlike mutual funds, are largely unregulated by securities industry cops. This doesn’t mean they can break the laws, it just means that they can engage in lots of legal but risky investing strategies.