Orange County Register – Wherever you travel on the information highway, look out for factoids.
These tricky little creatures are bits of supposed knowledge that nobody has bothered to verify. They take on the aura of truth as they are repeated by people assumed to know what they are talking about.
Norman Mailer coined the term in a 1973 book about Marilyn Monroe. Mailer defined factoids as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper.”
The term must now be applied, it seems, to a standard item of background that appears in many stories about hedge funds – those fast-proliferating investment vehicles favored by the best and the richest.
So says no less an authority than Warren Buffett, chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and the most revered investor of our day. In a letter to Financial History, the magazine of the Museum of American Finance, Buffett gently begs to differ with a statement in the magazine that the first known hedge fund was started in 1949 by Alfred Winslow Jones.
This is, says Buffett, “an error that has often appeared elsewhere, including in a Federal Reserve report.” While Jones was indeed an early practitioner of the hedge-fund art, says Buffett, he was not the first. The esteemed investor and writer Benjamin Graham managed a hedge fund as early as the mid-1920s.
