Alfred Winslow Jones

Alfred Winslow Jones (born September 9, 1900 in Melbourne , Australia , † June 2, 1989 in Redding, Connecticut , USA ) became known as the inventor of the hedge fund concept.

Career

Born in Australia, he moved with his parents, General Electric representative Arthur Winslow Jones and his wife Elizabeth, b. Huntington's, to the United States at the age of four. Jones studied at Harvard University until 1923 and then worked as a paymaster on a passenger ship .

In the early 1930s he was employed as Vice Consul at the US Embassy in Berlin . In 1932 he married Anna Louise, formerly Hauser , the daughter of the painter Joseph Block . The marriage was divorced after a few months. In 1936 he married Mary Carter, with whom he traveled to Spain, torn by civil war. 1941 Alfred Jones was with his sociological dissertation on Life, Liberty and Property at Columbia University doctorate .

In the 1940s he worked for the business magazine Fortune . In 1949 he set up the first hedge fund .

During his research as a journalist , Jones found that none of the professional stock analysts could really tell him reliably whether the stock market prices would rise or fall in the future and concluded that he had to find a strategy that could make money - regardless of that the direction in which the stock exchanges are developing.

They bought the shares of companies that he and his employees believed could rise (undervalued companies) . Of the companies that they believed were doing badly, they sold the stocks without actually owning them ( short selling ). By buying and selling shares at the same time, they were able to eliminate some of the market risk .

In the past 50 years or so since the Jones Hedge Fund was founded, technology and financial instruments have become more refined, and computerized calculations and analyzes have become possible, but Jones' ideas for alternative investments still apply .

See also

• George Soros