[btcoal]

You're so right. I had the same reaction to this and the New Yorker article covering the same.

I got interested in hedge funds in high school after reading a lot of articles like this. But after learning a lot about economics and finance I learned to pick up the sensationalism in these articles.

I think just about every article about a hedge fund has a line like, "consistently beats the market...which most economists say isn't possible." That's not even true. The free market hypothesis has not been given much stock outside of the University of Chicago (Eugene Fama) since the 90's. Most economists who even study such things focus on under what scenario can an investor outperform the market and what types of securities tend to be undervalued.

I'm even amazed that the article doesn't begin by mentioning Ray Dalio's childhood as a chess prodigy/math olympiad/other thing that only really really smart people can do.

These articles typically have a set format: 1. Intro into the mysterious culture of the hedge fund 2. Background on the precocious child prodigy turned market whiz 3. Description of firm's hiring practices of PhD's etc 4. Questioning value of Hedge Fund's to society 5. In conclusion, this hedge fund makes a lot of money...

I almost want to run some NLP scripts over a corpus of profiles of hedge fund managers and automatically generate a dozen of these, print them, and see if I can get a job at Bloomberg.