[kasey_junk]

Well to be fair, it's also not the real hurdle than any investor in Hedge funds use. It's more of a marketing term than anything else (and often funds don't target the S&P as their benchmark, but something else closer to their trade category).

Almost all investors in hedge funds will want to see the portfolio of all previous funds you've managed as well as how much of your own money you have in the fund, how much leverage you are doing, alpha, beta, risk adjusted metrics etc.

That said, the Hedge Fund industry is going through a consolidation. Lots of small funds were essentially S&P indexes with leverage/hedges and execution ability. The rise of ETFs, the decrease in execution costs, and the creation of a true history of performance has made those funds pretty obviously useless and they are (rightly, I believe) dying.