[user5994461]

I'd say the exact opposite. One of the best kept secrets in the industry is that people know exactly what they are doing.

There are plenty of positions that are stable and low risk. Like running the exchange itself, all sort of middlemen and some form of arbitrage.

A hedge fund is mostly about funneling as much of customer money as possible to the fund manager. It's a fairly straightforward and risk insensitive business.

[SatvikBeri]

The strategies that tend to work are boring and low capacity, so they don't get much advertising, and people don't hear about them.

There's a massive saliency bias in that the strategies people are most likely to hear about are ones with some excitement behind them – that gives people a massively distorted view of hedge funds.