A few weeks ago the London-based Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA) issued a “comprehensive rebuttal” of my book, The Hedge Fund Mirage. AIMA’s mission is to promote the hedge fund industry, so one might anticipate a breathless endorsement of their paymasters, and in this they did not disappoint.

 
I didn’t bother commenting on their report because it didn’t receive any mainstream financial press coverage. Few serious journalists took them seriously. And in any case, AIMA’s clients (i.e. hedge funds) have (unfortunately for their clients) been helpfully providing further empirical support for my assertion that $2 trillion in AUM is more than they can usefully manage by generating consistently mediocre results at great expense.

 
But Jonathan Ford in today’s FT rightly questions whether the hedge fund industry as a whole is over capitalized. Mr. Ford is providing a far more useful perspective for consideration by those pension funds cramming ever more assets into hedge funds than the industry’s increasingly ineffective and far from impartial lobbyists.