Hedge Funds Mystify Markets, Regulators

"There's been a fundamental change in the debt markets that I don't think people appreciate yet," said Richard Bookstaber, who has managed hedge funds and recently wrote a book on the topic, "A Demon of Our Own Design."

"I don't think anybody knows how much leverage a particular [group] of hedge funds is using or how much leverage has grown. . . . We are running the risk of making the markets more levered and more complex so that something can go wrong all of a sudden," Bookstaber said.

So what is a hedge fund?

For starters, hedge funds take money only from those with deep pockets. They pool huge amounts of money mainly from super-wealthy investors, Wall Street banks and other hedge funds. About 25 percent of their money comes from pension funds and endowments, according to data from Greenwich Associates.

In the late 1940s, managers of the first hedge funds invented ways to make money no matter which way the stock market was moving. They used terms like "short the market" -- a technique for profiting when stocks go down -- and "going long" -- which means selling stocks after their prices have gone up. The trick was figuring out how many "short" and "long" positions a manager should have in a portfolio.

But to understand what hedge funds do today, it could take "two PhDs and an MBA," as Greenwich Associates hedge-fund analyst Karan Sampson put it.

Some funds bet on how stocks, gold prices and interest rates will move. Others turn almost any kind of cash flow -- including credit card payments, home mortgages, corporate loans, plane leases, and even movie theater revenue -- into bonds and trade them.

One of the most successful fund managers, Edward S. Lampert of ESL Investments, runs an $18 billion fund that makes money in part from what are called "total return swaps." These provide insurance for traders holding risky investments. If the investment goes down, Lampert absorbs the loss, but if it goes up, he enjoys the gain. In exchange for agreeing to the swap, the trader gets regular cash payments from Lampert.

Lampert's fund reportedly has earned returns of 30 percent every year by trading in swaps and other obscure financial tools. He personally made more than $1 billion last year. Most fund managers get their pay by taking a 20 percent cut of the profits from their trades and collecting from investors a 2 percent annual fee based on the total value of a portfolio.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was an advocate for how hedge funds help spread investment risk across many partners. The concept of "risk dispersion" has been described by Federal Reserve Governor Donald L. Kohn as a pillar of the "Greenspan doctrine." Over the past five years, advocates say, it has created a more stable financial system.

In 1998, just when hedge funds were starting to become big, Long Term Capital Management collapsed, nearly paralyzing the U.S. bond market. The disruption was so severe that the Fed had to organize a temporary rescue. The fund lost about $3.6 billion before closing in 2000.

But when the Amaranth hedge fund imploded in September 2006, losing about $6.4 billion on bad bets in natural-gas commodities, federal regulators stayed on the sidelines. Returns plummeted for a few hedge-fund managers and a pension fund in San Diego, but the markets generally shrugged off the news.