Underperforming hedge funds (again)

More bad news for hedge fund returns, according to this NYT piece. A standard 60% equity/40% bond portfolio returned 90% over the last decade, compared with 17% after fees for a common hedge fund index.

The author finds some people just seem to want to pay higher fees for lack of transparency and hints about secret rocket science under the hood. People - and also pension funds. Two-thirds of the industry is now institutional money. But how long can that go on, if performance is so bad on average?

 

The "Semantic Web" is next

This is an interesting piece on where Google Search is going in the future.

Until now, Google has been an unprecedented signposter of knowledge. It has not "known" the answer to anything itself but it has had an awfully clever way of directing you to exactly the place you can find out. In some senses, that attribute is in the process of changing. This year, Google will roll out what it calls its Knowledge Graph, the closest any system has yet come to creating what Tim Berners-Lee, originator of the web itself, called "the semantic web", the version that had understanding as well as data, that could itself provide answers, not links