A Hedge Fund Offers to Share the Risk of Losses
Most funds take a cut of profits, but Steve Diggle says traders should bear the pain of declines as well.
Steve Diggle got rich by trading other people’s money. Now he’s trying to upend the very business model that made him wealthy.
Once co-head of a $5 billion hedge fund that was among Asia’s largest, Diggle quit the industry eight years ago to manage his own money. From the sidelines, he came to recognize that the $3 trillion industry was rigged: Investors were paying exorbitant fees for subpar returns, managers earned huge sums for amassing assets, and traders shared profits with clients but not the losses. As Diggle puts it, there simply wasn’t any logic to the classic “two and twenty” hedge fund fee model, in which managers traditionally charged both a 2% annual management fee and took a 20% cut of profits.