Meet the Hedgies

They donate islands to charity, think nothing of spending £7,500 on lunch and consider first-class air travel 'a sign of failure'. So what's it like being the wife of a hedge-fund manager? Not half as glitzy as you think, writes Julia Llewellyn Smith

In the main living-room of her townhouse in the Boltons in South Kensington, Lucie is stressed. Her pilates tutor should have been here ten minutes ago, the new Filipina maid folded the towels for the third guest bathroom all wrong and her husband's PA has just called to say he won't be able to make their anniversary dinner at Gordon Ramsay tonight as he has to entertain some bankers. Which is irksome, because Lucie has a pile of property brochures she wants to show him for the chalet they've decided to buy in Courchevel.

Friends have told them this is crazy - global warming might mean no more snow in 20 years - but Lucie and her husband have just donated £50 million to an environmental research charity, making them certain the problem will be sorted. Which reminds Lucie: if she can't see her husband tonight, she might as well get on with re-reading Das Kapital for her MPhil.

Welcome to the world of the hedge-fund couples, a world of unimaginable wealth, unparalleled luxury and tasteful discretion set off with occasional acts of philanthropy. Heirs to the Carnegies, the Rockefellers and the J P Morgans, who more than a century ago accrued astonishing fortunes and remade the face of corporate America, the hedge funders inspire fear and envy wherever they go, thanks to the astonishing sums of money they command and the fact that few outside the industry are sure exactly what it is they do.

Based mainly in London and New York, an estimated 9,000 hedge funds are believed to control $3 trillion of cash. Forming a relatively new and highly secretive industry, hedge funds are independent companies that invest the money of the super-wealthy. Unbound by the structures of banks, where a fund manager cannot take risks for fear of upsetting clients such as pension funds, these men (there are very few women) are free to use unconventional money-making techniques such as betting (or hedging) that a share price is going to fall.

Typically, a 'hedgie' picks up 20 per cent of the profit he makes for a client. 'Linda Evangelista boasted she didn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day; the joke now is hedge funders won't for less than $10 million,' says John, who runs a company marketing funds to new clients.

Inevitably, such a high-risk, high-return lifestyle attracts the highest of fliers. 'Hedge funds cream off the stars of the banking world, gunslingers who are frustrated by all the red tape and want to do things their way,' says John. Usually ex-bankers or traders, they flaunt their independent status by rejecting corporate pinstripes in favour of polo shirts and chinos, even at important client meetings.
Harry Becher, a fixer for Quintessentially, the upmarket concierge service that counts dozens of hedgies among its clients, confirms this. 'They're not rock stars or artists,' he says. 'But nor are they grey-suited number-crunchers. They're very interesting individuals.' No wonder that chronicler of modern mores Tom Wolfe described the hedgies in the launch issue of Portfolio, a new American magazine aimed at the ultra-rich, as the 'new masters of the universe'.

O resto do artigo, do Telegraph de Londres, aqui.