Navigating the Hedge Fund Maze – March 2009

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Hedge funds didn't see much good news in March--excepting the man with the golden touch, John Paulson. Most of March was spent focusing on the crumbling state of once noble hedge funds. For example, Fortress's stock was down more than 90 percent from its opening-day high. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  

There are many former fund managers and execs who are suffering due to the crisis. Ken Karpman, once made $750,000 a year as an institutional sales trader and then went on to launch his own hedge fund, which promptly failed. Now, he finds himself delivering pizza to pay the bills.  

While there is real pain in the hedge fund industry, there is one occupation that is booming: That of hedge fund private investigators. Due to the nervousness caused by Bernard Madoff and other fraudulent advisors in financial services, investors can no longer rely on cursory methods of research. One company hired a PI firm to look into a hedge fund and found out that it didn't reconcile trades daily as the manager had claimed, reported inconsistent asset values and used an auditor related to its founder. The fund subsequently shut down.