Alfred Winslow Jones

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

Career

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

In the early 1930s he was employed as a vice consul at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. In 1932 he married Anna Louise here, Est Hauser, daughter of the painter Joseph block. The marriage, however, was divorced after a few months. In 1936 he married Mary Carter, with whom he traveled to the strife-torn Spain. 1941 Alfred Jones received his doctorate with his sociological dissertation on Life, Liberty and Property at Columbia University.

In the 1940s he worked for FORTUNE magazine. In 1949 he established the first hedge fund.

In his research as a journalist Jones noted that none of the professional stock analysts could tell him really reliable if the stock market would rise or fall in the future and drew the conclusion that he must find a strategy that could earn the money - regardless of in which direction the stock markets develop.

From company, which he and his staff were confident price rises ( undervalued companies ), they bought the shares. Of the companies in which they believed that they badly wirtschafteten, they sold the shares without actually owning ( short sale ). This simultaneous purchase and sale of shares they could turn off a portion of the market risk.

In the last 50 years since the founding of Jones hedge fund technology and the financial instruments were always more refined and with the help of computers complex calculations and analyzes were always possible, but the ideas of Jones have for the alternative investment still valid.