When George Soros rented a new office by Manhattan’s Central Park in 1973 for his four-year-old hedge fund, he and his fellow “hedgies” were the lone gunslingers of modern capitalism. Shooting wild bets on little more than a hunch, funds lived – and died – fast. No longer. Over the past four decades Mr Soros’s fund has grown from $4m to $25bn, but he is now the grand old man of a maturing industry in which lone gunmen are no longer welcome.
Hedge funds are reinventing themselves as something much less adventurous – and at first glance it looks as if a new sheriff in town, America’s Securities and Exchange Commission, may be responsible. Investors in Mr Soros’s Quantum funds were told this week that they would be given their money back, so the fund could escape new rules brought in by last year’s Dodd-Frank act. By investing only Mr Soros’s family money – all but $750m or so of the total – his fund would be exempt from the new rules.
This is by no means the first time a fund titan has bowed out, seemingly put off by new rules. Stan Druckenmiller, Mr Soros’s former number two, closed his fund just weeks after Dodd-Frank passed. He said stress was to blame, but with hindsight the timing appears an odd coincidence – particularly given that the corporate raider Carl Icahn made a similar move this spring.