Interesting concept.<p>Here is why I think it might have problems. Most Hedge funds fall into a few categories, almost all of which won't help the average person invest....<p>1) guys who have a great understanding of one very niche area. These types of funds tend to work for a couple of years until the niche goes away, ie you might understand how prefered's work better than anyone else but sooner or later the rest of the market will catch up and your alpha goes away.<p>The average person can't take advantage of this as they won't have the contacts, expertise, legal ability, etc to work in these niches<p>2) market micro structure, these are your HFT and algorithmic guys, you just can't do this on your own so knowing what they do doesn't help you at all.<p>3) the warren buffets, knowing buffet's portfolio doesn't do you any good as buffet gets invited to do deals by the companies themselves at discounts to their current values, ie a company that needs cash will offer Buffet a preferred at a discount that pays a generous return.<p>Again this just doesn't help the average person.<p>4) Funds that just shouldn't have been started, these are your SELL side guys who leave GS or Morgan Stanley to try it on their own and then find out just how hard it is to trade your own money and how cushy they had it trading someone elses money.<p>Again not much help to the average investor.<p>5) Guys who trade esoteric instruments, usually the alphabet soup you have heard of like MBA's, CDO's, etc.<p>The average person can't trade these so it doesn't help them to know what a hedge fund investor is doing here.<p>To be honest the biggest thing that has convinced me that the average person shouldn't invest, and more importantly shouldn't listen to others about what to invest is what I glean from economists.<p>I'm gong to guess that I have access to better economists than 99% of hacker news and if I talk to 100 economists I'll get 50 telling me the market is going down over hte next year and 50 telling me that its gong up. And these are well credentialed people who work for well named companies and government agencies and none of them can agree on anything.<p>If they can't agree, it should let yo know just how much guessing the average person who has "studied the market" is doing.<p>TL/DR Just picking stocks is a very small niche in the hedge fund space as its just really hard to do and the ones who do well at it, often do well due to other factors such as getting in at IPO's, getting restricted stock at discounted prices, etc due to their relationship with sell side firms.<p>Plain old fashioned picking stocks is a crap shoot no matter who you are. Just say no.<p>I'll certainly agree that there is a current glut of funds chasing the same deals.