I think hedgefunds summed it up fairly well. Except, I don't agree that money has flowed out of hedge funds into private equity funds. Both of those asset classes have experienced huge inflows this past year at the expense of mutual funds. As 2cents said, good money managers have choices too. However, the number of truly good money managers who are really worthwhile are very few and far between. Most are major beta surfers (that means they are playing an implicit long equity strategy in one form or another). Convincing an investor to take a risk on an 'early stage' manager is a very valuable and rare skill that should be well compensated. The fact is, if you are one of those rare few, you will spend many years proving it before investors will flock to you. You need to survive in the interim. If you are great, you can pay 3PM fees on the first $500 Million and the next $5 Billion you can raise on your own. Also, if you are that great, you can raise fees to 50%+ like the really great ones (ie. Rennaissance, Tudor, SAC, etc.).