Hedge FundsThose people who work in the sphere of finance are quite accustomed to the presence of many kinds of funds in the market. For all the rest their existence is something unattainable. We live in quite a different world that varies from the financial one in the presence of quite real and concrete things. What are hedge funds, you may ask? First let's consider the word hedge. It means something that protects an individual against possible problems, a financial loss in particular. But the hedge funds are the so called pooled investment vehicles that accept investors' money and later invest it in a diversity of securities on a collective basis. Moreover this is a fund that uses arbitrage, trades undervalued securities, options and bonds and invests in any market that can make a profit and reduce risk.
One can single out fourteen definite investment strategies that hedge funds use and each suggests various degrees of risk and return. Some kinds of such funs like macro hedge funds for instance prefer to invest in stock and bond markets as well as in currencies. Comparing with another type of such funds like distressed-securities hedge fund, for example, macro hedge funds are faster growing and besides they are more volatile. So speaking about distressed-securities hedge funds they buy the equity of companies in order to enter or exit financial distress. Here one can also enumerate such varieties of these funds like Equity hedge fund or Relative value hedge fund that also have their own peculiarities and perform different actions according to their own strategies. It is important to understand that all funds have their own strategies and they are all different and suggest different results in the end. Volatility, risk, investment returns - those are all the criteria that are taken into consideration while thinking about the funds' strategies and their effectiveness. Though there are some certain features that are common to almost all hedge funds. For example, they all strive to reduce volatility as well as risk and attempt to preserve the money and deliver positive returns at the same time. There are of course a great variety of hedge fund technology and instruments to reduce risk and they certainly use them all. Like any fund or other serious organization hedge funds require great specialists in this field. All of them have special spheres where they are responsible for particular operations and activities. There also exists one concrete misconception about hedge funds that has become rather popular in the financial world. It is believed that they are volatile, meaning that they all use global macro strategies. But in fact even less than 5 per cent of them are global macro funds. Many of the funds do not use leverage and may or may not use derivatives at all. In general those are different things and for those who deal with that business it is important to know. |