Difference between Hedge Fund and Private Equity?
Private Equity is simply some type of an investment company, which is owned in a way not accessible to the public. ie: Warren Buffet runs Berkshire Hatheway, which is an investment company which itself is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This means that anyone can buy shares in the company, and own a small fraction of it. If Warren Buffet owned all the shares of Berkshire Hatheway, it would be a Private Equity company. Note that 'Equity' refers to the ownership of the company itself; a private investment company may simply buy Bonds (which are a form of Debt), in which case, they would not be technically considered a 'Private Equity' company. A Hedge Fund is a very broad term which I don't believe has significant meaning. Technically, it means something along the lines of an investment fund (either public or private) which attempts to hedge the risks of its portfolio, by carefully considering what type of investments it purchased. This refers back to the meaning of 'hedge', ie: 'hedging your bets'. In my opinion, 'Hedge Fund' is not meaningfully different from 'investment fund' or other similar terms. It is just the most popular way to refer to this type of industry at the present time.  You can see the trend of using the term 'investment fund' vs 'hedge fund' using this link: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=hedge%20fund,investment%20fund Note that the high-point of the use of 'hedge fund' occurred on October 2008, right at the peak of the global financial crisis. The term evokes a certain image of 'high finance' / 'wall-street types' that may exploit various situations (such as tax legislation, or 'secret information') for their own gain. Without a clear definition, however, it is a term without much meaning. If you do a similar comparison between 'hedge fund' and 'private equity', you can see that the two correlate very closely; I believe the term 'private equity' is similarly misused to generally refer to 'investment bankers'. However in that case, 'private equity' has a more clear definition on its own merits.
One of the often cited advantages of ETFs is that they have a higher   liquidity and that they can be traded at any time during the trading   hours. On the other hand they are often proposed as a simple way to   invest private funds for people that do not want to always keep an eye   on the market, hence the intraday trading is mostly irrelevant for   them. I am pretty sure that this is a subjective idea. The fact is you may buy GOOG, AAPL, F or whatever you wish(ETF as well, such as QQQ, SPY etc.) and keep them for a long time. In both cases, if you do not want to keep an on the market it is ok. Because, if you keep them it is called investment(the idea is collecting dividends etc.), if you are day trading then is it called speculation, because you main goal is to earn by buying and selling, of course you may loose as well. So, you do not care about dividends or owning some percent of the company. As, ETFs are derived instruments, their volatility depends on the volatility of the related shares. I'm wondering whether there are secondary effects that make the   liquidity argument interesting for private investors, despite not   using it themselves. What would these effects be and how do they   impact when compared, for example, to mutual funds? Liquidity(ability to turn cash) could create high volatility which means high risk and high reward. From this point of view mutual funds are more safe. Because, money managers know how to diversify the total portfolio and manage income under any market conditions. &gt;Nearly 20 years ago in the book Market Wizards, hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt said the term hedge funds is a misnomer because most funds don’t hedge, and a new name is almost 2 decades overdue. The more apt titles such as Alt In or absolute return funds haven’t seen any traction, so hedge funds seems here to stay. Besides, consider how misnamed mutual funds are. Vanguard is one of the only mutual fund names that remains a mutual ownership structure, so what’s in a name anyway. "I know some derivative markets work like this, so maybe similar with futures.  A futures contract commits two parties to a buy/sell of the underlying securities, but with a futures contract you also create leverage because generally the margin you post on your futures contract is not sufficient to pay for the collateral in the underlying contract. The person buying the future is essentially ""borrowing"" money while the person selling the future is essentially ""lending"" money. The future you enter into is generally a short term contract, so a perfectly hedged lender of funds should expect to receive something that approaches the fed funds rate in the US. Today that would be essentially nothing." "Asset management typically refers to the ""product""  group e.g. Mutual fund, etf, etc., like invesco offering qqq or some emerging market mutual fund.  Capital management is more vague and can refer to a wide range of financial products and services including asset management and stuff like ptfl planning, wealth advisory etc.  That said they are both used interchangeably and not like anyone would correct you if you used one vs the other..." As Ross says, SPX is the index itself. This carries no overheads. It is defined as a capitalization-weighted mixture of the stocks of (about) 500 companies. SPY is an index fund that tries to match the performance of SPX. As an index fund it has several differences from the index: The opposite of a hedge is leverage (aka gearing). A hedge is where you spend money to reduce your exposure. Leverage is where you spend money to increase your exposure. Spread bets are a form of leverage - that's what makes them such an effective way to lose all your money, quickly. I don't see that this follows. Capital commitments require that one assess the ability to unwind as information changes - market frictions.  Thats why private equity demands a premium.    HFT is not investing - it is far closer to market making.  In that regard it is a social good.  What is of a concern is that they are far less supervised than a market maker.  They provide liquidity the way bankers provide loans - when it is not essential.  The old adage of an umbrella when it is sunny but take them back at the sign of rain.  If there are requirements to commit capital and maintain orderly markets with some oversight on their ability to maintain their capital ratios, a shadow market maker, then they should get to enjoy making a spread in exchange for keeping those spreads relatively tight. "I though that only some hedge funds operated that way and others were specific vehicles to provide an efficient hedge? This one is described as ""betting against chipmakers"" and is blaming a substantial loss against one market, so it can't be doing a great job of hedging itself.   Though I think we're saying the same thing and just have a different view of the common meaning of ""hedge fund""." "You quickly run into issues of what denotes ""similar"", and how to construct an appropriate index methodology. For example, do you group all CB arb funds together globally or separate them by country? Is long-bias equity long-short different to no-bias and variable-bias? Is a fund that concentrates on sovereign debt more like a macro fund or a fixed income fund? And so on. By definition, hedge funds try not to mimic their peers, with varying degrees of success.  Even if you get through that problem, how do you create the index? You may not be able to get return numbers for all the ""similar"" funds, and even if you do, how do you weight them? By AUM, or equal weight?  There are commercial indices out there (CSFB, Eurekahedge, Marhedge, Barclays, MSCI, etc) but there's no one accepted standard, and it's unlikely that there ever will be as a result. It's certainly interesting to look at your performance versus one of these indices, and many investors do monitor fund performance this way, but to demand strict benchmarking to one of them is a big ask..." Just from my experience and observation... VC there are spikes of activity.  Where many deals are closing and board meetings and issues pile up on top of each other and happen all at once.  But VC there are lulls where not much is going on.  PE is more consistent and predictable in general.  Yes of course exceptions arise but I found PE to be more 9 to 5 ish. Colloquially, there's no difference except for the level of risk (which is an estimate anyway). Classically, investment is creating wealth through improvement or production.  Purchasing a house with the intent to renovate and sell it for a profit would be an investment, as the house is worth more when you sell than when you bought it. Speculation, on the other hand, is when you hope to make a profit through changes in the market itself.  Purchasing a house, letting it sit for 6 months, and selling it for a profit would be speculation. A hedge fund is such a broad term as to not mean anything in practice. What do you find interesting in finance? Research that, understand that. Then go find the guys who are doing that and ask for a job and take it regardless of how much money it offers. The money is the yardstick, not the goal "I'm not the OP, but I'm happy to give a brief overview.  Basically, pre-JOBS act there were a lot of limits on who could make an equity investment in a non-public company (i.e. a startup or even a hedge fund). There were some loopholes, but basically you had to be an 'accredited investor'. An accredited investor was someone who either has made $200,000+ ($300,000+ for married people) for the past two years and expects to make that much again in the current year. Alternately, they could have a net worth of $1 million, excluding the value of their primary residence. There was also a limit of 500 investors for a non-public company before the company had to become public (they didn't really have to IPO, but they did have to file their financials with the SEC, so the effect was basically the same). Finally, non-public companies were prohibited from seeking investment through advertising basically. They couldn't take out an ad in a paper or event send a mass email and say, ""Hey, we're looking to raise a $1 million funding round, contact us if you're interested!""  Okay, now after the JOBS Act.  The JOBS Act changed a) the number and type of investors who could make equity investments in a non-public company b) the regulation of advertising for investments.  Post-JOBS private companies could have 2,000 shareholders and 500 of those could be unaccredited (e.g. regular people like you and I). The change in the number of shareholders isn't really that important because it's just shareholders of record, but that's another post for another day. There are still some requirements for unaccredited shareholder, which I don't remember off the top of my head. I think you have to have income of at least $40k. They also changed the solicitation ban, so it's possible that you might see an ad in the WSJ someday for a startup company, venture capital fund, hedge fund, etc.  There are some other things it changed, but IMO those are the two most important." "It's not really my field, but I believe it's all the information that doesn't change (i.e. isn't ""real-time"") about the business of hedge funds.  For example, this site quotes: The product maintains comprehensive static data records including assets,       depositories, accounts, settlement instructions and a wide range of       supporting data..." I'm not 100% familiar with the index they're using to measure hedge fund performance, but based on the name alone, comparing market returns to *market neutral* hedge fund returns seems a bit disingenuous.  That doesn't mean the article is wrong, and they have a point about the democratization of data, but still.