Hedge Fund Managers Lose Their Swagger
ByIn six months, investors have withdrawn $16 billion.
Third Point manager Dan Loeb.
Doug Dillard followed the path that once almost guaranteed entrance into the 1 Percent: Good college (Georgetown), investment bank (Morgan Stanley), MBA (Harvard). Then a hedge fund. A decade out of business school, he was heading Standard Pacific Capital, a multibillion-dollar San Francisco firm that traded global stocks. It did well by its clients, making money in 2008 as markets plummeted.
But Dillard’s returns—like most other hedge fund managers’—failed to keep pace in the post-Great Recession bull market. Investors exited. In February, when assets slid below $500 million, Dillard pulled the plug. “It has recently become clear to both of us that sometimes there is a logical conclusion to even a good thing,” he and his partner, Raj Venkatesan, wrote to clients…
